I’ve been thinking more about the implications of the recent price changes in the desktop 3D printing market.
For those that haven’t been watching, two events have reset the price of desktop 3D printers in the past couple of years.
First, Bambu Lab introduced the X1C and its siblings. These offered highly reliable 3D printing at speeds 5X that of conventional 3D printers of the day. All of that came at a price comparable or lower than professional machines. This drew a massive audience, and Bambu Lab sold uncountable numbers of these machines.
The second event was Elegoo’s introduction of their Centauri Carbon device a few weeks ago. This machine is, by and large, comparable to Bambu Lab’s P1S — except the price is significantly less. Today the X1C is priced at US$1399, whereas the Centauri Carbon is only US$299. Even Bambu Lab’s P1S, a less capable version of the X1C, is priced at US$759.
All this means that the price brackets for desktop 3D printers have been reset. All machines must now march to this pattern. As an example, I’ve seen many of the now-slow speed, open gantry machines being marked down to US$80-100, whereas two years ago these machines were priced at US$300-400.
Aside from the obvious competitive issues among the 3D printer manufacturers generated by the price reset, there’s another issue: how can you possibly start a 3D printer company these days?
In the old days it was certainly possible to slap together a desktop 3D printer in a garage or makerspace, and begin selling it. In fact, many of today’s bigger manufacturers started in exactly that way.
Could this be done today?
Absolutely not.
In order to compete, a new startup 3D printer manufacturer would have to match what’s on the market today. That means a new machine would have to have at least the following:
- 250 x 250 x 250 mm build volume
- High speed 3D printing
- Color touchscreen
- Enclosure
- Heated, removable print plate
- Quiet operation
- Multiple sensors and real-time monitoring
- CoreXY motion system
- High reliability
- Easy maintenance
- Cloud remote monitoring and control
- Advanced slicing system
- Slick industrial design and packaging
- Filtration
- Multilingual support
- International distribution and support
- And more…
And that’s just the ante to get into the game. To succeed, you’d have to have MORE than just the basics. You’d need additional features that differentiate the new product from those already for sale.
It’s even worse. Even if you somehow made a machine that met or exceeded all those features, you’d have to do it in a way that can be manufactured and sold for US$299 or less and still make a profit.
That’s right, you’d have to make a machine that would cost around US$100-150 internally to build.
Achieving that in a garage as a startup is now impossible. You would need an extensive team of specialists to develop this new system and even then suffer over years of a struggle to get noticed. Massive marketing costs would be required to break through. I expect a startup company of this type would require many, many millions of dollars to proceed through the development process.
This is no longer a viable scenario. It would seem that going forward, we will see new, advanced desktop 3D printers only from existing players that already have the resources to produce these new models.
The desktop 3D printing industry is slowly converging on a few players.
