[randomdata]

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear in the original post. I'm interested in one-off pieces that I can design to solve problems around the house and if it takes a month to wait for that, no big deal. I don't need thousands of pieces.

The parent to my original post suggested there was something akin to 3D printing out there in terms of cost and versatility that was just slower to produce. Something designed for mass production certainly isn't it.

[001sky]

I'm interested in one-off pieces that I can design to solve problems around the house and if it takes a month to wait for that, no big deal

This does not seem like a big market, though. Exlcuding perhaps interior decoration. The engineering properties of 3d printed items for DIY are still TBD (lots of plastic cracking complaints, glued paper doesn't seem much better in terms of field-use). Also, in practice waiting 30 days for a DIY prototype is unlikely to be acceptable (serial project workflows & all that). small batch CNC will get you access to metal. Access to ABS does not seem all that special. Is there something in mind you have (like a project?) or is this all just theoretical?

[randomdata]

Like I said, I was just interested to know what other technologies are directly competing with 3D for one-off builds that can produce the same result (in terms of cost, function, etc.), but have the downside of being slower to produce as suggested by the poster before me.

[001sky]

The slower/faster thing is really more an issue about iteration and time to market for projects. Project costs are a function of overhead--in addition to piece-cost. Overhead is a function of speed and thus project cost is a function of speed. This cost is/can be an order of magnitude larger than the unit-piece-cost. In other words, if you relax the speed constraint you implicitly relax the cost constraint, at least in a normal context. But these tradeoffs (and choices) depend on understanding a project's scope/spec. You are high-light at least one edge case, though: the home DIY, where time is no value but unit cost is paramount. In this case 3D printing might be a good idea, provided your project is suited to such an ouput.