Feature Update: Hub Pricing

[Filemon]

Hello fellow Hubs,

Last week we updated our Hub pricing system, making it a lot more advanced. We’ve already got tons of questions over the weekend so time to do a quick run through.

Let me start by putting out a statement; your Hub price has NOT changed. The update allows you to do more advanced price setting but we didn’t make any changes to the price with the update itself. Ok, here we go!

First, have a look at your printer overview on “My Hub” or directly https://www.3dhubs.com/my-dashboard/hub/printers. Here you can check which of your printers are currently online, toggle on/off, or add printers. For this example, let’s look at my Ultimaker 2

Expanding the Ultimaker view gives the following result.

Here I can set:

• Completion time - this will be shown in the search result for customers and can be used as filter when customers have a deadline
• Materials - Add, remove, or edit materials for my printer. All of the discussed advanced pricing options apply on materials. So different materials can have different pricing options. For this example, I’ll take ABS.

Expanding the ABS view gives:

This is where the advanced features kick in. For the current view I haven’t made any changes just yet, so default is shown.

Let’s go through it top to bottom:

• Colors - You can set any color, or even come up with names. Just bare in mind that these are the colors the customer sees and will use as filter when searching for a Hub. Therefore I would recommend using basic color descriptions (yellow, green, white) instead of “sunlight flare” for example
• Bulk Pricing Reduction - You can set a fixed discount for prices above a certain treshhold. For example, checkboxing this feature allows me to set a 15% discount on orders above “$25”. This means the every $1 above $25 will be discounted to $0.85, making me more competitive for bigger orders. The first $25 will be fully charged in this example.
• Minimum Order Value - If a customer places an order below your Minimum Order Value, the price shown will automatically increase to match this minimum value. You will not receive orders below this price point.

Moving on to Layer heights. You can set multiple layer heights per material, pricing them each individually. Key here is to set the right expectations, don’t set a resolution which you cannot deliver. The coolest thing to focus on here though is the New Pricing Detail setting. We’ve added quite a few options, which , depending on your kind of printer are vital for accurate pricing.

Fixed pricing details:

• First print - The costs of your first print. Same as startup cost. Theoretical example, if a customer would place an order of 1 print with no volume or surface area whatsoever, the first print price would be the final price.
• Subsequent Prints - The added cost for each subsequent print. For example, a customer would like to print 8 parts in total (it doesn’t matter if they’re the same or not). The calculation for the “base price” would then be: First print value + 7x Subsequent prints value. Of course, on top of this base price we must add any of the other pricing details mentioned below.

Pricing details based on geometry:

• Sliced volume - The material volume used for printing, priced per cubic centimeter (cm3 = volume). Depending on the model, the average slicing infill is ±20%. So twenty percent of the object volume is needed in material volume to make the print. With this Pricing detail enabled, the customer will pay for the exact amount of material used in the print.
• Object Volume - This is the total volume of the object, before slicing. In other words, the “sliced volume with 100% infill”. Useful for SLA prints for example (e.g. Formlabs) that print 100% infill.
• Bounding Box Volume - The volume calculated by basically taking a “cube” of width x height x depth of the part’s dimensions. Imagine capturing the part in the smallest possible box. This feature is especially useful for printers where the bounding box is a leading figure for determining cost. For example, with Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), the cost price per prints heavily depends on how many prints you can get printed in one go. Bounding box is a useful feature in this case.
• Surface Area - Pricing based on the surface of a print. Useful when pricing for hollowed out prints, if sliced volume becomes inaccurate for the actual cost involved. Some SLS providers use this feature in their pricing.

Ok! That’s all!

Please put any questions in the comments below.

Cheers,

Filemon

[bilsch]

Can we get a feature for material/color choices per part? I’ve had a few orders where people want different materials and colors for a single order.

For instance printing Pocket PiGRRL by adafruit - Thingiverse - there will be at least ABS or PLA ( or other ) in one color and then ninjaflex/semiflex of a different color.

So far I’ve only had a few orders but imo this is something which would be nice to get baked in to the order as text

[TypeR]

@

Thanks for the explanation and the update.

I do not know of course how other hub owners do it, but I ALWAYS adjust the price calculated according to the results of the WEIGHT of material which is needed to fulfill the order as calculated by my own slicer. That will include the material needed for support, rafts etc. (As a FDM-printer-user, I buy my filament by weight, not by volume )

In about 95% of the time the amount calculated by 3DHubs is incorrect and usually to little.

For example, just last week I got an order through 3D Hubs which involved a model of a house’s framework to be printed.
The material for the object itself was calculated at about 140 grams. However, since this was an extremely open framed object, it would have needed something like twice the final weight in support material. This made the order prohibitly expense, so the order was declined after pointing this out to the customer.

[eckerj]

I wish I could upvote this +1000!

@ - Please bring back the ability to enter our own weight and/or volumes. The way it works now, we can either:

1) Accept your (3D Hubs) calculated print volume using the system-generated print settings to calculate volume and use that value along with our (hubs) printer per-volume costs to calculate the price for a part.

-or-

2) Manually enter in a price for a part, completely ignoring the per-volume costs we entered into our printer profiles.

I use different print settings according to a customer’s individual needs. More/less perimeters, higher/lower infill, thicker/thinner roof/floors, more/less support material, rafts, etc.

By making the change to your order page, you’ve made it harder for us to calculate the true cost of each part of an order. We now have to manually go back and multiply our specific calculated part volumes by the per-volume@resolution cost we entered into our printer profiles and then enter that value into the order page. The previous way made much more sense where we could enter in the sliced part volume.

[Josh_Raples]

Hey, how about email updates when you make big changes like this? Sometimes I don’t have time to check the Talk part of 3Dhubs and I miss big changes like this. Changes that seem to stop people from placing orders if I don’t update my information.

The last time you guys made a big change to the pricing layout I didn’t notice for over a week and in that time I got no orders because I assume my pricing was all messed up to anyone viewing my page.

Thanks,

Josh

[eckerj]

I’m also in the same boat. All incoming orders say resolution TBD, no matter what printer/resolution is selected by me or my customers.

[NoNaym]

This update seems to have broken my hub! Totally unexpected, and without warning. Now when anybody places an order, the print resolution says “TBD,” and the price estimate is not calculated correctly. On top of that, I have been trying to reach out to support about the issue, but am being ignored (at least it feels that way). Could someone at 3D Hubs acknowledge this problem and address it ASAP???

[NoNaym]

Agreed, some sort of formal notification about the changes would be much appreciated. Instead of just letting us figure it out for ourselves, how about a notification email stating the changes that are about to be made?

[Filemon]

Ok clear, I will address this with support and see what we can do.

[Filemon]

@LaGi @wei_sheng_3139 hi guys, I’ve checked both your orders but was not able to find any issue. Could you maybe upload a screenshot of what you mean? Thanks and sorry for the hassle

[NoNaym]

Once again it looks like some changes were made without anybody being informed. You guys really need to work on your communication!! Just checked my problematic orders, and it looks like the problem may have been resolved in the last few hours. Will definitely report back if the issue resurfaces. Either way, here’s to hoping for better communication from 3D Hubs admins… oh and some local support agents would be nice too. Sucks having to wait a full day (or multiple days/full weekends) for responses from the folks in Amsterdam. Just my extra 2 cents

[Filemon]

Got it! An update is planned for this Wednesday, but we could have done better here I agree. For now, let me give you all the support you need

[Filemon]

Taken! thanks for the feedback guys, valuable!

[eckerj]

Here is an order of mine that was showing TBD for the resolution.

A moment ago, I refreshed the page and it now shows the resolution.

[NoNaym]

Please see my last response above with screenshot attached. Thanks for your support!

[NoNaym]

I just triple-checked some things and noticed that (at least with this order, which was already having TBD issues before that was miraculously fixed) this quote is not being calculated correctly… or maybe it is? This is seriously super confusing, and way less intuitive than things used to be. My price for ABS is .75 per cubic cm. According to this order, this part is 5.7 cubic cm (or is that for all 4 parts??? Really unclear!). Either way, this new calculation system is all messed up…

[Filemon]

I admit this is unclear. I went into the order an found the cause. If you hover over the “i” it says that typical FDM volume is 3,1cm3 and for most other printers it’s 5.7cm3. It shows the latter where it should have shown the first (bug).

Taking the 3,1cm3. We have 4 parts, so 4 x 3,1 = 12,4 cm3, multiplying this by 0.75 / cm3 gives $9.3, which is correct (there’s some rounding off in the shown volume so minor variation is possible).

So, admittedly, we need to fix the bugs, but you can be reassured that the pricing system itself is correct. Hope this solves!

[Filemon]

Could be a server issue then, that the calculations don’t come through quickly enough. Will check that hypothesis

[NoNaym]

This is still very counter-intuitive, and taking away the Hubs’ abilities to adjust part volume just seems crazy. Like others have noted in this and other threads, I have had to adjust the part volume on pretty much every order I have received (20+ orders) because the 3D Hubs estimate was not matching up with my part volume estimates (which come from my slicing software that I set up for my printer). This new system makes this kind of adjustment much more difficult and confusing, not only for your Hubs, but for customers who want transparency in their orders. Sorry, but these changes all just seem so sloppily implemented…

[altometer]

Cool, thanks. One feature I’d still like is to be able to offer “rush processing.” Right now, I just list my printers as multiples. Some with smaller lead-times but higher startup prices. Also, it is often confusing for people when I tack on fee for “parts cleanup.”

We should have “additional services.” Be a prompt at time of order.