Should You Buy a New Resin or FDM Printer or 3D Scanner For Your Business?

If you’re actually asking this question, then congratulations! People ask me this question all the time, but often after they’ve spent the money. Maybe they had a suspicion before they bought it that it wasn’t the best choice.

In this article I’ll also be sharing 3D scanner advantages and disadvantages, so you can make an objective, informed decision when building your business.

Now to start with, it’s completely the wrong question, and I’ll get to why in a moment…

But it’s so important that you are actually asking this question in the first place (yes, even though it’s the wrong one) because you know what’s worse? People not asking this question, and just going out buying that new 3D printer or 3D scanner, or whatever fan dangled piece of tech we want think our business needs.

I get it, really; maybe sales have been slipping recently, maybe they weren’t great to begin with…

Maybe you feel you’ve tried all the other 3D printing business ideas and this new printer will help speed everything up, or allow you to sell to new customers. Or offer new services to your existing customers. Or whatever.

Maybe you have a bit of money burning a hole in your pocket and you want to “invest” in your business - thinking a scanner will offer new options and services you can offer your customers. 
 
But here’s the thing; you or I should not be answering this question. It’s not for us to make that decision. 

What I mean is, it’s a bit like expecting yourself to predict the future. It’s a bit of a fools errand. 

Instead, we need to go to the source and find out from there what we should do. Let’s use the data to guide us!

But many of us assume what they want. Or we ask one or two people what they might want. And often they might say something like “Yeah… I guess that sounds good?” in response.

Customers have wants and needs - and your business is going to do the job of pacifying some of those with whatever product or service they want to buy from us, to do just that. 

The better you do at that, the better your business will be, in short.

That’s literally the goal. Ultimately we want the business to serve us, the owners - but it can only do that after it serves the customer in the best way. 

Customer first, and the wondering how to make money with a 3D printer bit comes second. 

So it only makes sense that when we’re making important decisions in our business, like whether or not I should get this new printer or scanner, or what product to sell, or if I should setup a new workshop; we always need to be asking ourselves what’s the best thing for the customer? 

Not imaginary customers, mind. I’m talking real ones - the kind that actually want to spend money.

So to tackle this - we just need to look at what the customer wants. IF the customer wants a certain product from us and we either have market research, some other data, or several of them explicitly telling us that’s exactly what they want to back this up, then you have an easy route forward.

We can work it out from this simple rule…

If non of those are true, then it’s not justified.

If non of those are true, then that money you “invested” in that scanner or whatever, wasn’t actually an investment. 

I’m afraid to say it was in fact… an impulse purchase. 

And impulse purchases don’t tend to bode well for businesses, because usually they don’t have the thing that makes an investment an investment; a Return On Investment (ROI). 

Every single thing you spend money on in your business should have a clear ROI. Either a benefit to your time, or reduced costs, or increased output (that to meet existing demand). 

As an aside “impulse purchases” also don’t tend to bode well for relationships, so all is forgiven if you prefer to retain the word “investment” when you’re actually talking to your spouse about an impulse purchase because it sounds a whole lot better - as long as you yourself know the difference. 

Leads me on to what I think about 3D scanners. They’re impressive tech, truly. 

But for 95% of situations, they’re not profitable pieces of equipment. Following Moore’s law fairly closely, the price of them is also dropping over time as you’d expect.

Most of the 3D print service businesses I know that actually own one, don’t tend to make any money off them. Which is saying something when that typically costs $1000 - $15,000, even for the more affordable 3D scanners. 

Honestly, if you’ve made 10 x the amount of money you spent on a scanner, with a per hour rate over at least $50/hour, then I’d love to hear from you.

Worse, they’re a massive time suck too, because you can’t exactly scan a model and then get a perfectly print-ready STL automatically. No, that mesh of data points is very incomplete, and needs a lot of modeling work to make it ready. Even on the really good ones there’s a lot of setup work.

And in business, every activity we do needs to have a cost associated with it so we’re not inadvertently wasting a ton of time and (more importantly) the opportunity cost of that time.

Meaning, if you waste 8 hours fixing a 3D scanned file so it’s ready to print, it’s not just the 8 hours at whatever your hourly rate target is, it’s how much you could have actually grown your business in that time doing productive activities.

So it’s a double edged sword, as it were that will keep you stuck.

So give this solid consideration before you decide if you want to buy a 3D scanner for your 3D printing business.

Now for my last rant point in this admittedly rather ranty-sounding article, is what should your next printer be to invest in. 

I’ve already written an in-depth guide on how to choose the right 3D printer for your business here. But I’ll address the thought process behind why choose a certain printer from a business strategy point of view below. 

First and foremost, it’s generally a bad idea to have multiple types of printers in your 3D print farm. The more different types of printers you use, the more variety of problems you’ll experience and the more time you’ll need to spend learning and fixing these machines. In short, it will effect your profit.

So with each different type of model you buy, think twice behind the real reason you feel you need it - in short, does that fit in with your thought process we outlined above? 

Best to make a good decision to begin with, and stick to it as you grow. If you do change printer models because of, for example, a new faster model, you’ll want to work to upgrade the other printers to this same model as soon as funds allow or as the business requires them. 

He was actually able to streamline workload in the business and increase output at the same time as they’re much faster machines. Also less time repairing because they’re newer.

But does this mean you should do the same? That depends, but likely not. Your best approach is to have a loose strategy (like the next printer I buy will be a newer, faster machine) and then just do that when your business is at the level you need it to be. 

Don’t put the cart before the horse and rush into getting loads of extra printing capacity before you even need it.

Additionally, if you’re starting out with FDM printers, it’s not a wise choice to then just go and buy a Resin machine for the sake of it.

As we outlined above, unless you have a specific need for the different technology - that you know will result in more sales or higher sales prices. Because otherwise it’s just more tech, more learning, more breakdowns, more to go wrong, and more complexity in your business.

And if you want to create a business that truly serves you (after serving the customer) than it’s important to keep things simple. I’m sure you’ve never, ever heard that, before.

So hopefully, this article has saved you some money and time, so you can keep your business streamlined and make sure your money is in fact, invested wisely.

If you’d like to know how to increase sales of your 3D printed products, I’ve created a PDF that shows you the strategies our clients have used repeatedly to double the sales of their 3D printed products in 28 days or less. It’s called How To Double Sales Of Your 3D Prints In 28 Days - click the button below.