Sodo Maker Space has the day pass for $25. I looked for additional hourly info but couldn’t find anything. I’m sure classes have a much higher rate.
So as the customer, what draws me to your laser over other options if I have to pay more for inconveniencing you?
I guess the better question is what is your motivation for I’m offering up your machine? And what demographic is your target clientele?
The only option for me, unless I’m actusally starting a laser business, is to help out someone. Likely that someone will at least be an acquaintance, if not a friend. I simply wouldn’t charge a friend at all, and I wouldn’t charge an acquaintance very much, certainly not $60 an hour. I doubt that there would be any circumstance where someone I don’t know at all enters my home to use my laser.
In my case I was answering Dan’s question on the hypothetical. I don’t intend to offer it to non-friends/family. So like you, no charge. Like Drea (I think), if it’s someone who abuses the favor the next time they’ll ask I’ll be busy. I travel a lot for business so it is a relatively significant imposition on my disposable time to do this - hence not doing it as a side business.
BTW, as a comparison our MakerSpace has a fairly full featured facility in terms of laser, CNC, large bed vinyl cutter, 3D printing & scanning, wood working, vacuum forming, metal mills, etc etc as well as classes on a variety of topics (like IP protection, fund raising, grant writing, etc) and training (laser ops, CNC, 3D modeling, 2D design, robotics, programming, etc). Our monthly membership (24x7 access) is $75 and our day rate is $25 (I think) so most everyone just is a monthly member. There’s an hourly rate (cheap) but only available when we’re staffed - so about 20-30 hours/week. If you’re a member and you’ve taken the appropriate training you can use whatever you want for as long as you want doing whatever you want. We replace normal consumables like mills, ABS/PLA filament, etc. but the member is on the hook for major project materials like sheets of wood or other filament types for the 3D printers. The other makerspaces in the area charge either 100 or 150 per month for similar facilities. We do charge extra for training classes ($20/class) but that’s discounted due to a grant we’ve got to help train folks in making technologies. We host a lot of public stuff as well so people can come down and dabble in aduino or Alexa development without having to commit to membership. We’re a non-profit so that helps as well.
So you are saying your time, design skills and knowledge are not worth more than $25/hour?
Doing it yourself at a makerspace it’s always going to be cheaper than hiring someone to do it for you. Your time spent on your own projects is doesn’t cost you a thing except time.
Most people have no desire to do it themselves. They want to hand it off for someone else to deal with it. If they want to do it themselves, they will buy a laser or go to a maker space and not call you.
As a home based business, my liability insurance will not cover a stranger using my laser (or any equipment) in my studio, which means that I’m babysitting the laser.
By the time I add insurance, taxes, the cost of the GF, wear & tear on the GF, electricity, internet services, writing up the invoice, and credit card processing fees, etc., I’d be losing money at $25/hour. At $25/hour, I’ll stick with CAD design & 3D printing which pay more than double and only use the GF for personal projects. And I can multitask while 3D printing and the equipment is a heck of a lot cheaper.
The local laser shop I’ve been I outsourcing projects to charges $100/hour, so charging $50-$60 per hour is a bargain to my potential customers. Sure they can load a 4’x6’ sheet of plywood in their laser, but how many people really need that?
An interesting question. My time may be less or more valuable than someone else’s. But the biggest variable is the laser time. I’ve seen places charge by the inch (and different rates for cut vs. engrave, based on material and thickness.)
Have you considered building in a laserness meter that would show how much laserness was used on a given job? That may be a useful amount to charge by.
That’s good to know! Looks like you can buy a 5 day punchcard for $100, too. Hopefully I won’t ever need that resource again, but it’s always helpful to know what’s available.
And I hear what you’re saying about not charging friends/charging acquaintances a low rate. I’ll probably do the same - but it still helps to have a baseline, y’know? That way you can establish up front that “The going rate for these services runs about $45/hr, but because I love/like you, I’ll do it for free/cheap”. It gives you a fall back to renegotiate if needed - let’s say, in the event that your friend gets so excited about free laser cutting that they decide to go for full volume product production.
(on that note, @jamesdhatch your guess was spot on - I’ve had my kindness mistaken for a weakness more than once, so I’m a bit protective in that regard )
I think these discussions also just give everyone a bit of food for thought, so when we get our happy little lasers and maybe decide to launch or expand a business, we can factor this (real or perceived) value of laser time in to our pricing structure.
If design was involved my time would be worth much, much more… but the hypothetical was no design needed. Simply being present and answering basic UI questions, loading material, etc… That is certainly not worth design level fees. I further assumed that the user would show up with design files ready to cut and wouldn’t be using my PC for anything but interaction with the GF.
@jamesdhatch I get your point. I was just trying to look at it from the customer perspective. If I had project files ready to cut, I wouldn’t pay exorbitant fees to rent someone’s GF for an hour or two. If services were offered such as design, prepping CAD files or the like to convert to SVG and are then ready to cut, etc… then I might see my way to pay a specialist to help me.
Most companies that use current lasers charge between $1-2 USD per minute of laser time in my area, so I’d probably stay somewhere right around there. Maybe a little less.
I feel like people who go way below that are just thinking of how easy the machine is to use, not the maintenance of using it so much, at $250 a filter, ~$600 a tube, plus anything else that needs to be fixed, it seems a little shortsighted to charge really low fees.
A lot depends on the actual tube life. If the tube lasts 1,000 hours (number out of the air, don’t have an actual reasonable estimate of tube life in hours), then $5/hour pays off the entire Pro/Filter before the first tube dies. If you charged $10/hour for usage, you would pay off , replacement tube, and filter before the tube needed replacement.
So the actual hourly cost to keep/maintain (even potentially replace) the is not extremely high. This does not, of course, cover the cost of materials or design time. I would probably, at a minimum, rate based on 500 hour tube life with a possible upcharge just to maximize return.
The problem is in the definition of “exorbitant”. I can use two other lasers besides the GF so there is no $ figure I’d pay. But my son’s girlfriend is an architecture student at SU. They have a requirement to build models of their capstone projects or they don’t graduate. The problem is there are only a couple of lasers available and all the students are trying to get their models cut in the same week. Some plan better but most don’t. With a 5 year degree program on the line they are willing to pay hundreds of dollars (tuition & fees are 65K so it’s relatively small money in defense of large money).
It’s like time and how long is a long time - depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.
I have something you need or want. I have a price to make it worth it to me to let you have that thing. You get to decide it’s too much and move on to someone else. Others may come to a different conclusion. At the end of the day the market decides what exorbitant is.
If you can make $60/hour for your skillset, why would you want to work for less than half price?
If you are self-employed designer, do you charge a different rate when you meet with a client for an hour? Are you going to charge them less for the meeting since you aren’t actually designing something? When folding a printout to make a mockup brochure, or hand cutting mocked up business cards, do you charge a lower rate?
If you work full-time for a company, do they pay you a different rate if you are meeting with someone, doing paperwork/timesheets versus your primary job responsibility?
Another thought - if the person using your Glowforge at $25/hour breaks it, are you going to make them pay to fix it? What if they didn’t know their material contained PVC and it damages your machine? What if the material in the GF catches fire and causes damage? You’ll need to charge more than $25/hour to cover these scenarios.
i think the problem is that people are answering different questions. design time isn’t really part of “letting someone else use your glowforge.” to me, that means letting someone else run files on it (even if you’re there monitoring).
personally, i will let friends use it because they’re friends and they’ll be supervised by me. but anyone else? they’ll be paying me to run it. and at that point, they’re paying for my time and my expertise as well as the cost of running the laser and materials. but even if i’m just there monitoring, guess what? my time isn’t worth less because i’m not using a lot of expertise at the moment. if that means people won’t pay me to do that, i’m ok with that.
but that’s not what dan’s original post was about, in my reading.
Not sure I’m getting you - do you mean that you pay for the day pass plus an additional amount per hour? Or do you mean that you can choose between the two options (day pass/hourly rate)?
There are many models: unattended laser use, expert design assistance, etc. Since this is for curiosity, I decided to start with one approach, which is “attended use” - you’re there, but you’re mostly keeping an eye on things, and might be doing other things at the same time.
Definitely! I should have said this at the start, but I was hoping not to post numbers in this thread until most people had participated, so we don’t color each other’s opinion.
$1 per minute access for self ran machine use and $2 per minute charge if we run the machine for you. Machine time is billed in 15 minute increments and CNC mills require a $45 setup fee.
I think those are totally reasonable charges, btw.
That makes sense, and it’s probably where I got the original idea that I’d be looking at ballpark $60 - $80/hr for laser time in the Puget Sound area (compared SoDo, Fablab, and one that closed down).
It seems pretty consistent with rates I’ve seen in other areas.
I wrote out a big reply, and then I thought about it more… and deleted almost everything.
I do not think that monitoring time should be worth more than $10 per hour. It is a simple task, and if your time is worth considerably more than that, maybe it is time to hire someone away from fast food to do that job.
I have no idea how long the tube, lens, and mirrors will last in my GF. So I am going with what I think is the low end and guessing 300 to 500 hours. Including odds and ends, I put a value of replacing the consumable parts of the GF at about $750.
Then electricity in my area cost $0.0844 per kWh. I am going to round up to $0.10 and assume the GF uses one kWh as well. Though it more works out to be about 0.8 kWh. So, the GF’s electrical cost is about $50.
So, the total just operation is approximately 800$ per 500 hours. This works out to $1.6 per hour just for the cutter. Now if I go for the 300-hour amount it works to be $2.6 per hour. So let’s go with the higher amount. Add in labor of $10 per hour and then round up for a little bit of profit to $15 per hour.
As a package, my current laser cutter has cost me more than $6.25 a minute so far, considering its purchase price and the amount of laser-on time I’ve put on it. That’s about 6 times more than my yet to materialize Glowforge would have been, but even it would have cost more than $1 a minute.
I mention this because it seems like some of y’all are forgetting that there is/was an upfront-cost in acquiring a laser cutter in the first place.
If a stranger wants me to drive them 100 miles, I’m going to consider more than the cost of the gas.
“Let’s see… 25 MPG, $2.75 a gallon. OK, you owe me $11.” - something I’ll never say.
If someone was running a Glowforge-based business, and they were renting commercial space at $1500 a month, and were able to run the Glowforge for 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, charging 10¢ a minute would basically cover the rent (no profit, no other costs considered). If they could only keep the machine running for half that time (which would be quite a feat, IMO), they’d have to go up to 20¢ a minute just to keep the doors open.
or people just won’t pay for me to do simple monitoring, which is fine by me. if i price myself out of doing something that isn’t particularly interesting, that’s not a bad thing. but if you only value your time by what you’re doing with it, you may end up only doing the things that don’t have much value. i value my time, regardless of what i’m doing with it.
)
, replacement tube, and filter before the tube needed replacement.
i value my time, regardless of what i’m doing with it.