Renting your machine to your business

Hello! I just purchased a plus and am anxiously awaiting its arrival!

I have a question on how some of you handle separating personal and business use on your machine? I am considering setting up an LLC, but would like to have the option of making personal items on it as well.

In an effort to keep personal and business affairs separate, I was considering renting or leasing my machine to my business since I’ve already paid for it from our personal account. One thing I am stuck on is fair pricing. Anyone else doing this? What are your thoughts?

Thanks!!

This isn’t a topic that I’ve seen discussed directly, but there have been some related discussions about external pricing. There’s probably some difference between what is a fair rate to rent internally versus the rate that you might rent/charge for external users, but these discussions might be a good jumping off point:

https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=pricing%20tips

This one in particular is a discussion about wholesale pricing, which may be a bit closer to your case:

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Some people have also brought up that homeowner’s insurance won’t cover your machine if it’s for business purposes – just something to factor in. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Thank you! I’ll review this thread!

This is a really good point - I’ll call my insurance company and touch base with what I need to do with them!

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(thanks to @evansd2 for making this more logical)

if you follow this:

$4k - and say it has a 2 year lifespan -
40 hours in a ‘work week’ times 4 – times 12 = 1920 work 'hours" divided by $2000
is $.96 per hour of use.

You end up with a too-low work year (generally accepted as 2080 hours), and your end units will be hours/dollars.

$4000 / 2 years /(40 hours/week * 52 weeks /year) and you end up with 0.96 dollars per hour. Unit analysis cancels out the years and weeks and you end up with dollars per hour.

[EDITORS NOTE] this is yearly figure

Loose and fast is an understatement. You’re assuming full 40 hour weeks, which leaves no time for job design and makes no allowance for maintenance costs.

I’d say you’re underestimating by quite a lot. I’d at least triple that.

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YMMV - your money may vary :stuck_out_tongue:

ok, the group think here, is as a 'rental to yourself you should be charging 'yourself" $3-5 an hour of use to cover materials / maintenance / consumables / power / etc which is more a REAL WORLD number then my cold hard lab math.

Thanks everyone! I think the idea of $3-$5/hour is a reasonable rate for my purposes.

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