Alright. We did it. We have released basic PLA at $15 per KG with free shipping. If you want to buy it push the "Shop" Button in the upper right of the site.
Now here is why that matters.
The whole point of Tangled is to get the cost of a spool of filament to $10. But that is going to take some milestones. Milestones you all have been helping us to hit by supporting the project.
When we started Tangled in 2023 we were selling a spool for $22 just like everyone else. We had to. Going from commercial production to making a consumer product has some teething challenges.
But now we are rolling. We have scaled up production. We have taken our lickings. And we are following our Evil Masterplan to make filament less expensive.
We went to larger spools, we have started re-using spools from other manufacturers. And we refined all of our processes to make it work better. And it is working, which is why we now get to drop the cost again.
This is hard to do guys. There is a lot of cheap filament out there. Some of it is still cheaper than this (give us a minute). Most of that other filament is made in other countries (looking at you china) or is made in other countries and say they are made in the US. (think weird brand names)
Anyway our PLA is fully and completely made in the US. US material supply. US labor. We aren't even paying minimum wage to do it. That is really hard.
But I'll tell you what is even more interesting. We do have a roadmap to go cheaper.
It is stupid that US manufacturers are not able to compete with overseas manufacturers of commodities like filament. And there is really no reason for that. Hopefully we kind of prove this with what we are doing. While also forcing the rest of the industry to reduce prices.
We also want to prove that filament can be much cheaper. 3D Printing is going to take over the world from injection molding. But it can't do it with a material supply chain like it is. We have to scale up. And to do that, costs have to reduce. The filament you purchase helps us increase scale so that we can lower cost.
Longer term we want to be a reliable low cost material provider to print farms. So that the capacity to replace molding can grow.
So now on to how we did it and what are the next steps.
This price reduction really comes from simple improved operations. Everything is getting into a rythm so we can scale up. (No more breaky breaky extruder) We have also added another extruder so that we can increase production even more.
In order to keep the reductions coming we have to purchase more equipment (additional dryers for PETG) and keep them running continuously (more purchases from you guys).
Really it all comes down to you all buying more filament. You buy more. We can scale up production and then we can pass the savings on to you so you can buy more.
We are in the unique position of being a print farm operator. Making filament helps our core operations so we do not have to make a living on selling filament. But we are not stupid. We want to make a profit from this work so that it is sustainable and can continue to grow. Ambitious missions are useless if you die in the process. So we are not going to let ourselves die.
So check out the new 15 dollar filament. It is just like the old $18 filament. Only Cheaper. And as usual let us know if you have any problems. (Though to be perfectly honest we might create an "All sales are final policy" to reduce customer support cost. We can match China on that. If I were you I would order a single order of our filament and then if you like it order more. And if you don't like it make us suffer for that. How else we gonna learn.)
Thanks again everyone.
If you’ve hit $15 filament, why are subscription customers still paying $59 for 3 spools?