You're not supposed to talk about prices. Let's do it anyway!

Nobody ever wants to talk about prices and the cost of making products, at least no businesses do as far as I know. Usually pricing is a nebulous thing to the consumer, decided at the whim of a big corporation who seems to be paying pennies on the dollar to produce something while charging the consumer an arm and a leg.

Well, we don't like that, and we don't want our customers to feel that way. I think that a business should be able to justify the amount they're asking somebody to pay, especially in these times when money is exceedingly tight all around.

Please note that this post isn't meant as a critique, or a complaint, or a criticism of anybody or anything. We just have a set of ideals we want to run our business on, and one of the most important things to us is openness and honesty with the community, because at the end of the day, we as people are a part of the rat community.

So let's do it. Let's break down the cost of the Ratellite™ and how we came to the $30 price point. This might get a bit in depth, so if you just want a quick rundown, you can skip to the TL;DR at the end of this post.

First up, is raw material cost, which is the second biggest factor in our pricing. All of our products are printed from PLA (Polylactic Acid), perhaps the most common polymer in 3D printing, and for good reason. It's classified as food safe, it prints very reliably on a wide variety of hardware, comes in almost any color you can imagine, and is made from plant starch from corn, cassava, maize, sugarcane or beet pulp making it far more renewable than petroleum-based plastics.

We did a lot of searching and a lot of testing when sourcing the PLA we use for RatPrints. It's possible to buy filament for as little as $7 per 1kg (2.2lb) spool on AliExpress, but lead times can sometimes be months, reliability of the material can be questionable, and you don't always know what substances or fillers may be in the material.

This last point is a key one for us. Our products are meant to be used by our pets and yours, so potential exposure to hazardous materials or substances is an automatic no go for us.

Ultimately, we decided to go with Bambu Lab's Basic PLA. It's reliable, usually ships from just south of us in Austin, making for a quick turnaround, and the Bambu Lab printers we use are already well-tuned for it. More than that, Bambu's filament is RoHS certified to be free of lead, mercury, cadmium and 7 other harmful substances, provides material safety data sheets, and uses refillable plastic spools, which cut down on the amount of waste we produce.

 

The trade-off is that this material retails for about $20 per kilogram, though during sales we can source it for as low as $14 per kilogram.

In our ideal scenario where everything always works, we can squeeze 3 Ratellites™ from a spool, which puts our filament cost at about $5 to $7 depending on the price we had to pay for the spool.

In addition to the plastic filament, we also use three heat-set threaded inserts and three M4 thumbscrews per Ratellite, which brings our total material cost to about $7-$9 per Ratellite.

Running Average Cost: $8

2. Printer Cost and Maintenance

Sometimes I look at my Bambu Lab P1S and the things it can produce, and it feels like magic. Other times, it hits a hiccup and I remember that it's an infernal machine that requires maintenance and a prayer to the machine gods from time-to-time.

The P1S I own was bought specifically for the RatPrints endeavor. It cost $550 and for that price, it's the best, most reliable 3D printer I've ever used. It doesn't need too terribly much in the way of maintenance, but if you follow the prescribed maintenance schedule, it's about $50 per year to keep it operational, assuming no major issues or part failures.

 

In our "perfect," ideal scenario, the printer would run 24/7, which would mean each Ratellite™ costs about $0.05 in maintenance.

Running Average Cost: $8.05

3. Electricity

The average energy consumption per-hour of the Bambu P1S is around 0.1-02.kWh, which means each Ratellite™ costs around $0.75 from my local energy provider.

 

Running Average Cost: $8.80

 

4. Shipping Supplies

Perhaps the biggest surprise I found was the cost of shipping supplies. Seriously, if anybody has a good shipping supplies guy, please let me know. Between boxes, shipping labels, label printer, packing paper, and tape, it costs us about $3-4 per Ratellite™.

 

Running Average Cost: $12.30

 

5. Website, domain, infrastructure, processing fees.

These are all kind of lumped together, because I'd consider them part of our "tech stack." I tried a few different e-commerce platforms early on, and for better or worse, we landed on Shopify.

Don't get me wrong, Shopify is great, and it is the closest thing we could find to a complete feature set that meets all of our needs and allows us to take a wide variety of payment options. While I find it a bit lacking in some areas such as shipping calculation, overall we're pretty happy with it.

Currently, we pay $40/month for Shopify, around $1.45 for payment processing per Ratellite™, $14.40 per month for a basic Google Workspace (email, file sharing and storage, office suite, etc.) and $20/year for the RatPrints.com domain name.

All told, that splits out to about $1.76 per Ratellite™ in our perfect world scenario.

Running Average Cost: $14.06

 

6. Time

Ah time, the enemy of everything. We've all heard the phrase "time is money," and nothing makes that more apparent than trying to 3D print new products at home. While time isn't a direct physical cost like raw material, printers, and maintenance, it is our biggest limiting factor on price.

Currently, we have two Bambu Lab 3D Printers running to make our products, though if RatPrints succeeds, this will definitely expand.

The print time of a single Ratellite™ is right at 8 hours, allowing us to create 3 Ratellites™ per printer per day under our perfect ideal scenario. Each Ratellite™ also requires about 5 or 10 minutes of post-processing work, and another few minutes to package up.

So, with 2 machines going 24/7 producing perfect Ratellites™ we can produce, on average, 180 per month.

This is definitely a far cry from large corporations who use injection molding to create their products. While the initial cost of set up for injection molding tends to be much higher than 3D printing, once dies are cut, they can create hundreds or even thousands of units per day at costs far lower than what can be accomplished with 3D printing.

The trade off though, is that we can easily iterate on our products, respond to your feedback, and rapidly improve and correct issues that we might find with our products.

At the end of the day, the true customer cost of the Ratellite™ is really about time.

So, how do you place a value on time? We can't exactly treat the machine as a full time human employee (haha, just kidding future robot overlords) because in theory the human labor involved in producing a Ratellite (loading and unloading machine, replacing filament, post processing, packing, shipping) is maybe 30 minutes.

 

So how to we determine a fair price for that machine time?

Well, most literature you find online for people "farming" out print time on their machines states that you should charge $5-10 per hour of machine time, but if we were to do that, the Ratellite™ would cost somewhere between $55 and $95, and frankly, I don't think that would be fair to you as the consumer.

Summary  and TL;DR:

So, in a perfect world, the Ratellite costs us, on average, about $14.06 to produce, which means at our selling price of $30, we're looking at a profit of around $16, which is a bit less than $2/hr per unit sold.

In reality, prints fail sometimes (domes are notoriously hard to print), machines break down, parts have to be replaced, and time and money end up being lost. This isn't a complaint, mind you, it's just reality.

We as a small business can't compete with the big guys when it comes to price. The advantage we have, however is that as much as we are the creators of our products, we are also the target audience. We love our animals and we want to create products they love, and what's more, we want you and your animals to enjoy them too!

We want to hear your feedback, your suggestions, your complaints, all of it, and we actually care about it. Because at the end of the day, if we're not producing something that you love and that your critters love, then we're not accomplishing what we set out to do.

So I hope this post was illuminating! Let me just end by saying we are truly grateful to the rat community and all of the love and support you've shown us so far.

Frankly, it's kind of scary putting new things out there, and there's always a fear that even though our mischief loves what we're making, nobody else's will. So thank you again for all the support.

With love,

The RatPrints Mischief, except Basil

Sorry, he told me explicitly to exclude him, then he made this face until I gave him a treat and went away:

 

 He does not apologize.