$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?
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.
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.