[talkingquickly]

Really? My impression has been that filament is pretty cheap e.g. < $30 per kg. For printing small objects, enclosures, small replacement parts etc, the filament cost has been pretty much negligible. That's why a lot of 3D print shops end up telling people just to buy their own printer if their doing any reasonable volume, because once the capital cost is out of the way, the consumables are fairly inexpensive.

[imaginenore]

$30 is ridiculous. ABS plastic is around $1,000 per ton (or cheaper if you buy 10 tons). Does it really cost so much to make a wire out of the granules?

[talkingquickly]

That means there's approximately a 30x markup from raw ABS to a spool of 3D printing filament being sold over the counter in a shop to a consumer. I don't know how much filament costs if you buy industrial quantities rather than consumer ones.

To be honest I don't know enough about industrial pricing to understand if it's ridiculous or not, 30x from raw material to something being retailed at a consumer level doesn't seem unbelievable to me.

Markup on a black ink cartridge (the original comparison) is something in the region of 200x, so nearly an order of magnitude higher.