How is Ponoko beating everyone’s prices by so much?
I’m a wood guy who has been commissioning laser work in acrylic for a few years because my customers (mostly US, but also international) like the added feature and material possibilities.
For the most part I’ve used Ponoko, although I’ve tried really hard to get away from them because of their frequent mistakes and delays. (I need a laser cutter who can also assemble and ship my acrylic products direct to my buyers, but I would never trust them with that.)
But here’s the thing: nobody’s prices come even close to theirs, whether it be big players like Pololu or just various local guys who are near my buyers.
What is up with that?
(The local guys all seem to want one file that they can run a thousand times, and they get turned off at the idea of frequent orders that are all different, so it's actually hard to even get a price formula from them.)
If you want a better idea of what they charge, you can find their best pricing under the “prime” program. For subscribers (at $40/mo), they charge 2 cents per inch of cut and the material prices bottom out at $4.50/sqFt of clear 3mm acrylic and $5.91 for white.
If you’d like to see an actual typical order of mine, tag me at enjay1669 at [the extremely popular email service provided by google].
Re: How is Ponoko beating everyone’s prices by so much?
Hi there,
I'm a member of Ponoko's service team and we're sad to hear you've had a poor experience with our service. We'd like to know what happened so we can work to ensure it does not happen again. You can respond here or send an email to Service at ponoko =)
As far as our pricing goes, we are a very small team and we handle a very large volume of orders. We're able to do this because of the system we have set up to ensure that design files from our customers are formatted identically and and the price calculation is automated. Being able to handle every order in the same way gives us the efficiency we need. Of course humans make mistakes but we're always trying to improve our system to help prevent those mistake from recurring.
We'd certainly appreciate any info you can give us to help us improve.
Re: How is Ponoko beating everyone’s prices by so much?
Just checking in once more from Ponoko.
We'd really love to hear from you if you've had any trouble with our service so we can work to make it better. You can always get n touch with us via Service@ponoko.com
How is Ponoko beating everyone’s prices by so much?
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