3DQue now has a new option for growing 3D print farms.
The Vancouver-based company produces software to manage large fleets of 3D printers, and it’s a good thing they do: the number of 3D print farms, and their sizes, are all growing rapidly. In fact, we had a story last week about a Chinese factory that intends on operating an amazing 10,000 3D printers.
Farms of that size and much smaller absolutely must be managed with software. That’s where companies like 3DQue come in: they provide a subscription service, AutoFarm3D, to plug printers into their cloud to enable full management, including job dispatch, monitoring, and statistics. 3DQue explains:
“Historically, many print farms relied on fragmented or manual processes that created bottlenecks as operations grew. AutoFarm3D was developed to unify operations into a connected production platform, replacing manual oversight with automated job routing, monitoring, and tracking.”
Currently, the company offers two levels of AutoFarm3D, a standard version and a “lite” version with some restrictions. The annual pricing is US$10/mo for Lite and US$30/mo for standard, and those are per-printer prices.
The news is that they are adding a new pricing option for lifetime use. In other words, it’s a one-time purchase for perpetual use of the system. This may be of interest to print farms that are financially able to do a large one-time investment in order to reduce ongoing costs in months and years forward.
As of this writing, 3DQue has not yet announced the Lifetime option prices. I could speculate that the pricing might be equivalent to, say, two years of subscription fees. If so, the pricing might be something like US$240 for Lite and US$720 for Standard.
That could be quite a bit of money for some operations. For example, if you had a farm with 100 printers and you wanted to “go lifetime” with 3DQue on all the machines, it might cost US$72,000. Or more, depending on 3DQue’s final lifetime pricing.
I expect many operations are fine with regular monthly subscriptions, as that provides a consistent and predictable expense. If you can match the number of printers with incoming work, it should all balance out. On the other hand, if a print farm hits the jackpot with an overly profitable order, it might make sense to convert some machines to lifetime and reduce costs in the future.
Via 3DQue
