Rapid prototyping without the procurement process.

Early iterations don't need to be pretty — they need to be in your hands. Because our pricing is machine time (£2 per hour) plus material by the gram — with a flat £2.50 handling charge per item on top — a draft-settings print genuinely costs less: drop to 0.24 mm Draft layers and wind the infill down (it goes as low as 1%, in 1% steps below 20%) and you're paying for a fraction of the plastic and printer hours of a default print.

When the geometry settles, run the same file again at 0.12 mm Fine for a smooth looks-like model. Same upload, same quote page — you're just moving two sliders.

• 0.24 mm Draft — fastest and cheapest; layer lines visible. For form-and-fit checks.
• 0.20 mm Standard — the default; a sensible middle ground for most working prototypes.
• 0.16 mm Quality — a step smoother, for parts people will handle.
• 0.12 mm Fine — the smoothest we print. For looks-like models and presentation pieces.

For scale: a 22 g PLA part with about 19 minutes of print time comes to £4.55 including handling. Iteration is meant to be cheap, and draft settings keep it that way.

Start in PLA at £0.06 per gram — 22 colours, crisp detail, the natural choice for looks-like models (just keep it out of hot places). When the prototype needs to survive being used, step up: PETG at £0.07/g is strong, slightly flexible and weather resistant; ABS at £0.08/g is durable, heat resistant and matte — right for enclosures and clips. TPU 95A at £0.13/g covers the rubbery bits: gaskets, grips and bumpers.

Polycarbonate (£0.17/g) is very strong, stiff and heat resistant to around 110°C, and for end-use engineering parts PA12-CF carbon-fibre nylon (£0.38/g) is the toughest material we print — wear and impact resistant enough for final parts, not just stand-ins. It's also what we reach for on the hardest-working 3D printed replacement parts. One honest caveat: our carbon-fibre filaments use chopped fibre, not continuous, so you get excellent stiffness for a printed part but shouldn't design around aerospace-laminate numbers.

The full comparison, colours included, is on the materials page.

We don't advertise a fixed turnaround, because without seeing the queue we'd be guessing. Instead, the quote page reads our live print queue and shows you an estimated dispatch date before you've paid a penny — and the price you see is locked in at checkout.

After dispatch it's Royal Mail Tracked 48 from £4.49 (2–3 working days) or Tracked 24 from £5.49, which aims for the next working day, with a live tracking page for every order. Local collection is free if you're nearby.

And while it prints, you don't have to wonder. Create an account and you can watch your own part being printed live on the workshop camera, straight from your order page. If a print fails our standards or arrives damaged, we reprint and reship it free.

There's no minimum order quantity and no 'contact us for volume pricing'. One prototype is fine — the minimum item price is £4.50 and the minimum order £8.50. Unlike injection moulding there's no tooling to pay off, so revision D costs the same as revision A.

If your part needs support structures, we decide that and price it in automatically — roughly 18% extra material and time plus a £3 removal fee, all shown in the quote rather than surfacing on the invoice. And there's room to think big: the build volume is 325 × 320 × 325 mm in a single piece, so full-size enclosures and housings print in one go.

Need 5–100 of the same iteration for testers or a pilot run? That's its own service — see small batch production, where extra copies earn automatic discounts.

Plenty of prototypes start life as a drawing on the back of an envelope. Our custom design service turns a photo, sketch or description into a printable model: simple parts like brackets, spacers and hooks are £20–55 and take 1–2 days; enclosures and snap-fit assemblies run £140–300 over 1–2 weeks; and full mechanisms or multi-part products are £400–950 with our specialist design partner. Whichever tier fits, we agree a fixed quote before any design work starts.