[ryanhuff]

From what I gathered from the article, one of your problems is that you didn’t understand the economics before you launched, and therefore your pricing was disconnected from the true costs. Next time, try to anticipate these by breaking down the various input factors (material, machine wear, design time, desired profit margin, etc). You may get an answer that convinces you it’s not worth it before you invest time.

[wespiser_2018]

I way under-estimated how long it would take to actually design something. I did a cost breakdown ahead of time on printing time + materials, but at that time the designs were simple, just text.

As things advanced, we had people ask for logos, and recreating them is really what took time.

There is still one lever here, and that was to increase the price to make that design time actually worth it. If I had to continue, that's what I would have done, but I was still losing my weekends and my free time was just more valuable.

[dylan604]

Lots of places charge a separate fee for the design aspect like this. Printing prices will stay the same as the time + materials is consistent, so that's what you charge the client. However, since you're having to do the design part, that's where you come up with a different pricing scheme. I've been in multiple places that had similar concepts that kept things somewhat sane.

[bobsmooth]

You were using SVG versions of the logos you were printing right? Just when you say designing it makes me think you were recreating the logos in CAD.

[ezconnect]

You can use AI now to design the STL files for printing.

[wespiser_2018]

This business ran from summer '24 to late winter '25. I looked at the time for AI generation tools, but things were pretty hacky then, and the general card stand shape had a lot of features built into it for better printing and assembly. I spent an weekend trying to do 2d to 3d on a pic of my Greyhound, and never got a 3d image that didn't have a glaring problem with it.

The one real optimization here, would be a tool that converts a logo into a multi-color print. There are some solutions like HugeForge that use height maps, or hacks you can do with an svg to convert it to an STL (shape) file, but I never found one that works. As with all this generation stuff, the killer is really the details: if things don't look good and you don't have an easy way to edit it, it's never going to work for the customer. Tracing is also just one step in the process, you still have to position it on the card stand and set up the multi-color print. That said, for complex logos, SVG -> STL might make sense.

I'm convinced I could vibe code something over the weekend that takes a logo, maps it to a set of colors using some sort of segmentation, then export that as a series of STL files that can be imported into Bambu Studio (or orca slicer) and then mapped on to a card stand.

If someone is looking for a project, an end to end "make a coffee table coaster from an image" would be a great web tool (or even CLI). Especially if you could enter the number of colors (or colors you have), modify the generated traces, and and export as a single 3MF file you can import into your slicer. That's complicated, but probably do-able in a few days.

[Domenic_S]

any recommendations? claude absolutely fell on its face editing my stls (while claiming success)