How much the unit price drops on a short run

With injection moulding the first part costs thousands and the second costs pennies, because the tooling is already paid for. With printing there is no tooling, so the first part costs what the last one costs. That sounds as though quantity does not matter — it does, but for other reasons and far less than people expect.

What falls and what does not

• Does not fall: material. Ten parts use ten times the plastic of one. There is no discount to be had here.
• Does not fall: machine time. Ten parts occupy ten times the printer hours, even printed in the same batch.
• Does fall: setup. Placing the file, choosing an orientation and checking it happens once, whether it serves one part or fifty.
• Does fall: handling per unit. Taking fifty parts off the bed at once is far quicker than taking one off fifty times.

That is why the volume discount is real but moderate: it starts at three units and widens in bands. Do not expect a hundred pieces to cost what ten cost — but do not expect ten times the price of ten, either.

Where it stops making sense

The sum is simple: tooling cost divided by the units you will genuinely make, plus the moulded per-piece price, against the printed price. Simple tooling for a small part runs into the thousands of euros; past that it is arithmetic. And the number to use is the units you will sell, not the units you would like to sell.

How to order a run without surprises

1. 1Order one sample first. It is the highest-return spend in the whole project: a part in your hand tells you things a screen does not.
2. 2Upload the file and set the real quantity in the configurator. The discount applies itself, and you see the final price before committing.
3. 3Think in machine hours, not calendar days. Two hundred parts are two hundred times the time of one: for a fixed date, give notice.
4. 4If you will reorder, say so. We keep the file and the configuration, and repeating is a matter of telling us how many.