Formlabs at $699, Bambu's H3C Leak, and Why Pro PCTG Costs What It Does

Welcome back to the 3D-Fueled Show! This is episode 17.

Every week I pick a few stories from the 3D printing world, tell you what I think about them as someone who makes the stuff you feed into your printer, and fill you in on what's happening here at our factory in Fargo, North Dakota.

This week: Formlabs launched a $699 resin printer, Bambu Lab may have leaked its next flagship, and we've more than doubled our production capacity. That last one comes with a longer story about pricing that I've wanted to tell for a while.

Formlabs Goes After the Hobby Market

Formlabs has been around since their Kickstarter back in 2012. Their first printers used a small UV laser, bounced off a mirror, to trace each layer into a vat of resin, and they went up against much bigger companies doing it.

They've always lived at the professional end. The Form 4 starts at $2,625, and the resin has historically cost a lot more per liter than what you'd pay for a hobby resin.

So I honestly didn't expect this: the new Form Studio 1 is $699, with a build volume a touch bigger than the Form 4. It ships starting November 16.

The bigger news might be the resin. Their new Alpha resins start at $29 a liter. A liter of resin is roughly comparable to a kilogram of filament, so that's extremely competitive.

Formlabs is also leaning hard on safety. With their low-odor resins and VOC extractor, they say it's the first resin printer to earn UL Greenguard Gold certification. A lot of resins out there, you don't really know what's in them, so I think that's a smart thing to lead with.

Is this competition for filament? Maybe a little. You still have washing and curing, so I don't think it beats something like a Bambu for ease of use. But Formlabs has really gotten a handle on that whole ecosystem, and it'll be interesting to watch what it does to the rest of the market.

Bambu Lab's H3C: A Leak, a Date, and Nine Toolheads?

Someone spotted a banner for the Bambu Lab H3C on Bambu's Australian store. It went up, and it came down quickly. The banner showed nine toolheads and a November 4 reveal date.

My guess? Bambu did this on purpose. Either way, everybody's talking about it.

From the screenshot, it looks like independent hot ends that the toolhead picks up as needed, more like the Prusa INDX than the Vortek nozzle swap on the H2C. If that's right, it should mean faster color changes and a lot less wasted filament.

Add the R1 laser and the S1 3D scanner they've teased, and Bambu keeps building out its ecosystem. I'm really curious how Creality, Prusa and Snapmaker answer it. (I'd be surprised if Snapmaker doesn't show at least a revised U1.)

November is also Formnext in Frankfurt, the biggest 3D printing trade show in the world. That's where Bambu showed off the H2C last year, so expect a busy month.

We've More Than Doubled Our Production Capacity

This one's a little self-serving, but I'm excited about it.

We started with three standard-speed extrusion lines. We've now added two high-speed lines, and each of those runs about twice as fast as one of our standard lines. On top of that, we put FEELO Prima automated winders on the high-speed lines so they can keep up.

That extra capacity is what let us bring down our quantity pricing:

Every tier applies automatically at checkout. No code, no emails. Mix and match any material and color, and every spool counts. And since free shipping kicks in at $99, five spools gets you both.

One quick note on big orders: if you're ordering 100 or more spools of Pro PCTG, or anything that shows as out of stock or pre-order, please email us at sales@3dfuel.com before you place the order. That way we can confirm timing and make sure your order ships as fast as possible.

Why Pro PCTG Costs What It Does

I know price is one of the biggest objections we hear, especially for Pro PCTG. So here's the honest version.

$29.95 a kilo on our site. It costs more on Amazon because we're covering Prime shipping and Amazon's fees. They take their pound of flesh. We make a lot less per spool there, so we treat Amazon more as a way for people to find us.

Profiles cost money. PCTG existed before we started making it, but almost nobody knew about it or how to print it. We've now built profiles for more than 30 printers, and we do it in-house on our own machines. That's somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000 worth of printers used almost entirely for profile development.

Questions cost money. Nobody needs to ask how to print PLA. Everybody has questions about PCTG. Answering them, making content and working with creators all takes time and energy, and often money.

Colors cost money. We have 60 colors of Pro PCTG and eight colors of Pro PCTG-GF, with more coming. Every color is matched for us by a U.S.-based colorant manufacturer, and we have to buy at least 100 pounds of each one. We dose colorant at about 2%, so 100 pounds goes a long way. Some colors run through in three months. Others sit on our shelf for three years. And some of those colorants cost $30 a pound or more, so that's over $3,000 tied up in a single color.

Are we making a few too many colors? Maybe! But print farms and makers need very specific shades, so we make them.

A company that only makes black can get to a really low price, because they never change colors and only stock one product. That's just a different approach than ours.

Here's the good news: with more capacity, we can do much longer runs of the colors that sell the most, like Midnight Black Pro PCTG. That's exactly what made the new quantity pricing possible.

What's Next

We'll keep adding Pro PCTG colors, because you keep asking for them. We're also working on some special-property versions of Pro PCTG for very specific industries. I can't say more yet, but some of you are going to be very excited. And I'm hoping to show off some new Standard PLA+ colors next week.

Want to see the new lines and winders running? Check out our latest factory tour. We'll do more tours once we get everything put back where it belongs. (So many tools are not in their homes right now.)

Got a question for next week's episode? Send it our way.

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Happy Printing!

- John