Get Ready to Make Money 3D Printing in 2022 $100K
More and more every day the more people
get 3d printers and the cheaper they
become and the easier it is to learn how
to do it so just take note that while you do have to
come up with your own pricing if someone
is just sending you the files and you're
simply printing them there is going to
be a price ceiling at which you can do that
and that price ceiling is going to be
based on the competitive market that
you're in so for example this camera planter right
here takes about 10 hours to print you
wouldn't be able to charge someone 200
for that if you already have the files
because someone might be able to print
it for as low as 50 but nonetheless once you have that file
you send it to the printer the printer
does all of the work so it's a pretty easy 50
if that's what you did charge for that
again when i do my pricing everything is
100 completely project based and the
reason is because there's so many
variables when it comes to 3d printing
there's things like how strong it needs to be meaning how
much infill or how much material do I
need to use how many perimeter layers do
if you're in the 3d printing
space you know what i'm talking about
uh there's just so many variables that
come into play so most
pricing i typically do is just all 100
complete project based pricing but to
give you a rough idea you could probably
charge anywhere from twenty to fifty
dollars to print something like this
little planter
right here which brings us to number two
number two is if someone needs the
design work and the printing done now
this is a whole different story so
for example before when we said
something like this could be between
twenty and fifty dollars to 3d prints
if someone needed this designed it's a
whole different story because now
someone is paying for your service to
actually go ahead and design that
product and that is another competitive
advantage that you might have is the
ability to design this now something like this is a pretty simple
design that can be made in either Fusion
360 watching this with no 3d printing
experience well those aren't going to make a lot of
sense but basically something like this
is pretty easy to design
however not all that many people in the
3d printing community
know how to do the design work there's a
lot of people that like just taking the
files and printing them for money therefore i
would highly recommend learning how to
actually do the design work if you're
interested in 3d printing as a business
because you'll get more bang for your
buck now when it comes to the design
work people typically charge anywhere
from
say thirty dollars to seventy five
dollars an hour depending on the level
of expertise needed for that specific
project so things can range for example this camera
planter right here would be a pretty
simple design but if someone approaches you and they
say hey i have this really expensive
patent i need this really specific
product made it's going to take an
expert to actually design it then again
that's a whole different story but when
it comes to basic design work you can
pretty much gauge somewhere around 30 to
probably 50 per hour for actually doing that design
work in programs like fusion 360 out so let's talk about how to really
make money 3d printing now we've already
covered the two basic options which is
3d printing as a service
and then 3d printing as a service can be
broken down into those two subcategories
which is
a either someone just sends you the
files and you print those or
b someone hires you to do the actual
design work you then design
and then print the product for them now
3d printing as a service is a great
option it's a great place to get started
and it's a really good way to learn how
to do it however 3d printing as a
service is a little bit difficult to
scale because let's say every day you have something
new that you have to design and print
and make changes to and do revisions
until it's perfect it can just be a lot of work quit
frankly so unless you're charging a
premium for that service it's tough to
scale that business and make a lot of
money however if you're just looking to make
an extra 20 or 50 or 100 bucks a day
3d printing as a service is a great
option number two and my most
recommended way to make money 3d
printing is to open up a store whether that be a shopify store
or an etsy store personally
i recommend doing an etsy store but if
you make prints and you sell them on
etsy it's a fantastic way that anyone
can get in and make money with very
little experience i have a link below to
how we set up our shop and have been
super successful
with that i highly recommend checking
that out if you're interested in getting
into 3d printing the biggest advantage with 3d printing
on etsy is that you're 3d printing the
same object over and over so for example
if i was selling these camera planters
right here well thankfully when someone
goes ahead and they order one of those
it's just the exact same object so
there's no design work involved i could
say stock up on 10 of them if i needed
to and then when someone orders
i can simply just send that order away
or see let's say you're selling a ton of
them you could even outsource the work and you could hire
someone else say hey i need 10 of these
camera planters how much does it cost
for you to do it because
if you don't want to have say 10 or 20
3d printers you can simply build up this passive
income stream that way the third way to
make money 3d printing is to sell your
files let's say that you get into 3d
printing you buy that
affordable 200 level 3d printer once you
get the hang of it you start designing
your own files now
once you have those files designed you
can actually sell those files those
files can be sold
on a variety of websites the most common
ones are cg trader and a website called
cults 3d lots and lots of people buy what's
called stl files so if you are interested in doing the
design aspect uh definitely definitely
consider
selling your files or licensing out your
files the reason it's so powerful is
because there's no
extra work required it's basically
passive income once you have the file
made if someone buys the file you upload it
to the website the website will then
send it to the person who bought the
file great great way to make money and then
it goes full circle so for example if
someone said hey could you 3d print for me uh maybe
like a coat hanger random object like
that you could say yeah no problem here's how much it cost
you could then do the design
print that for that customer and then
upload that design to a website where
people could buy it forever and
therefore just making you more and more
passive income if you had say 50 or 100 designs online
then people were buying
a super good way to make money and
finally the last way to make money 3d
printing is to sell your prints to what are
basically distributors so if you
are printing something that you think is
viable to be in a store or on a shelf
what you can do is you can go find
distributors you can then supply those distributors
with your 3d prints and have those
distributors
sell it to stores and places like that a
little bit more of an advanced way to do
it and you'd have to have
probably multiple 3d printers to be able
to scale your business in a way that you
can actually supply product it has to be
finished products so you have to really
know what you're doing to make a quality
product for this I don't really recommend this unless you
have lots of 3d printers lots of
experience lots of knowledge
and really reliable turnaround times but
there we go we just went over four
really great ways to make money 3d
printing so the question of can you 3d
print full-time absolutely you absolutely can is a
completely viable business option in
fact I really encourage if you're someone who
likes doing design work if you're
someone who likes tinkering taking
things apart experimenting with things
3d printing is fantastic even if you
just do it as a hobby
however yes as a business the answer is
yes you can 3d print
full time you just have to know what
you're doing and set up your revenue
streams properly again
i highly recommend using etsy do 3d
printing as a service get used to how it
works get used to designing files working with clients and
then try and expand your business from
there next I want to talk about the cons of 3d
printing because 3d printing is not
all sunshine and rainbows anyone out
there who's watching this video who
currently does 3d printing
probably knows what's coming up next the
bad things about 3d printing
number one is it takes forever some
prints uh some prints literally take 20
to 30 hours to do so
people think when they ask you to 3d
print something that it's going to be a
like 20 minute job it's not it may take
20 minutes to load the file to the
printer if they already had that file
but that file might take anywhere from
say five hours to up to even a hundred
hours we've done a couple prints there
around 200 hours of 3d printing and now
the issue with that is that what if a
print fails if you're new to 3d printing
you should know
that prints can fail and if you're
experienced with 3d printing then i can
pretty much guarantee that you've had
prints fail before
there's a lot of settings there's a lot
of things that you need to learn how to
do to get right there's supports there's
different materials there's different
temperatures prints can fail and the
unfortunate thing is that sometimes
prints fail near the end of a print so
for example
if you're doing a 100 hour print and you
had a print fail 90 hours in well
that really sets you back not
necessarily on cost because filament
cost is actually pretty cheap on the
contrary to what people think
filament cost is cheap if you order a
lot of filament or even if you order a
little bit of filament using things like
amazon or all the companies out there
now that are selling filament around one
kilogram of filament cost
anywhere between 10 and 20 which i
quite cheap because that one kilogram of
filament will last you
at least a day or two if you're printing
consecutively so
if you're charging say 100 a day and you
go through 20
a day in filament that's some pretty
good margins con number two is customer
expectations now uh this one is tough
because basically all you have to do is
assume that nobody knows anything about
3d printing and that you're gonna have
to explain to all of your customers how
3d printing works what i mean by this is
that
you get a lot of requests from people
that say things like hey i lost this
part to this dryer or this appliance
could you please uh design and 3d print
a new one
and then i'll go ahead and i'll ask them
well how much is a new one from the
store and they'll say
a new one from the store is going to
cost me sometimes people say something
like 10
and so people expect you to sit down for
an hour or two on the computer
design a custom part and then 3d print
it and they want to pay less than 10
so you just have to understand all
aspects to 3d printing before you quote
customers because yes if someone needs a
super small part printed can you do that
yes you can however it's not always as
easy as customers think and you need to
be able to explain that to people and
you need to know that yourself
before you take on those projects and
con number three con number three
is simply it's a lot harder than i
looks a lot of people think that you can
just go and order that basic machine
from amazon
set it up within five minutes press a
button and start printing whatever you
want
i'm here to tell you that that is just
not the case there's a lot more to it
than that
you need to learn how to use a few
different software packages before you
can even send files to your 3d printer
so
just be aware that if you are jumping
into this thinking that you're going to
make a quick buck 3d printing
there is going to be a learning curve to
how to properly operate your machine
and make things that work so the final
question is
should you start a 3d printing business
in 2021 and the answer is
yes yes you should if you're the type of
person that likes building things and
tinkering and maybe taking things apart
and
creating things from scratch things like
that if you want to start a 3d printing
business
just to make money uh bad idea it's
probably not gonna work out because you
have to have the patience to learn how
to do things and you quite frankly just
have to want to learn how to do those
things because
some of it is super boring some of it is
tedious you might spend
10 hours doing a design and 3d printing
it and it might just come out a big blob
of plastic that doesn't work so you have
to have patience to learn how to do
things
properly so yes i highly recommend
starting a 3d printing business in 2021
if you're the type of person that enjoys
actually doing it so i think that's it
for this video i've answered most of the
questions that i get regularly about 3d
printing and 3d printing as a business
if you have any other questions feel
free to drop them in the comments and i
will get back to you
additionally in the description of this
video there is the link to starting an
etsy shop
as well as links to all the printers
that i recommend