Need 5 to 100 of the same part? That's small-batch 3D printing — no tooling, no mould.
Injection moulding wants a significant upfront tooling cost and weeks of waiting before part one exists. Small-batch 3D printing skips all of that: upload your file, set the quantity and see the full price in seconds, with discounts of up to 20% on extra copies applied automatically. Each copy comes off the same machine in our UK workshop — and you'll see a realistic dispatch date, worked out from the live print queue, before you pay.
How a batch runs
Upload your file
STL, OBJ, 3MF, STEP or STP, up to 100 MB. The full price appears in seconds — no quote-request form.
Set the quantity
Discounts kick in automatically at 5, 10, 25 and 50 copies of the same part. You can also mix colours or materials in the same order if you need variants.
Check the dispatch date
The quote shows an estimated dispatch date from the live print queue before you pay, and the price is locked in at checkout.
We print, check and post
Every copy runs on the same machine with the same profile, gets checked by hand, and ships Royal Mail Tracked from £4.49.
No tooling, no setup fee — the price is just the print
Injection moulding is brilliant at ten thousand parts and painful at twenty. Before the first part exists you're paying for a mould and waiting weeks while it's cut. Change the design afterwards and you pay for tooling again.
Batch 3D printing has no tooling stage at all. Our pricing is the same transparent formula whether you order 1 part or 100: machine time at £2 per hour, material by the gram, £2.50 handling per item and £0.45 per order. If your part's geometry needs support structures, that's priced in automatically on the quote — the number you see is the number you pay. Upload your file for an instant quote — STL, OBJ, 3MF, STEP or STP, up to 100 MB — and the full batch price appears in seconds, locked in at checkout.
And because there's no mould, there's no retooling cost between batches — version two is just a new file, quoted the same way.
Quantity discounts that apply themselves
Extra copies of a part we've already set up cost us less to run, so we charge you less for them. The discount is applied automatically on the quote page — no code, no negotiation. And there's no minimum order for the service itself: one part is fine; the discounts kick in from five copies.
- 5 or more copies — 5% off every extra copy
- 10 or more — 10% off extras
- 25 or more — 15% off extras
- 50 or more — 20% off extras
The full batch price is shown before you pay, so you can nudge the quantity up and down and watch where the tiers land. For runs beyond about 100 parts, email [email protected] first — we'll tell you honestly whether a single-printer workshop is the right fit for your volume, or whether it's time to think about tooling.
One machine, one profile — consistent batch 3D printing
Every part in your batch is printed on the same machine — a Bambu Lab H2D — with the same profile, the same material and the same settings. Part 47 comes off the plate the way part 3 did, because nothing changed in between. When a job is spread across a farm of different machines, that's much harder to guarantee.
We'll be honest about the flip side: we're a solo UK workshop with one printer, not a hall of them. That's exactly why the quote page shows an estimated dispatch date calculated from the live print queue before you pay — a realistic date, not an optimistic one. And if you'd rather have proof than promises, create an account and you can watch your own parts being printed live on the workshop camera from your order page.
Every part is checked by hand before it's posted. If a print fails our standards or arrives damaged, we reprint and reship it free.
Bridge production and design changes between batches
Bridge production is where small batches earn their keep: you've committed to injection moulding, but the mould is weeks away. Print the first 50 units now, get them into customers' hands, and switch to moulded parts when the tooling lands. If real-world feedback prompts a tweak, the next printed batch simply uses your new file — no retooling cost, just a fresh quote on the revised part.
You can also mix within a single order — the same bracket in three colours, or a rigid PETG housing alongside TPU bumpers.
If the design isn't settled yet, our rapid prototyping service is the step before this one: iterate on one-offs until the part is right, then come back and run the batch.
Materials and sizes for parts that get used
Batch parts usually have a job to do, so material matters more than it does for a display piece. PETG (£0.07/g) covers strong, weather-resistant functional parts; ABS (£0.08/g) suits durable enclosures and clips; ASA (£0.10/g) holds up in outdoor sunlight; TPU 95A (£0.13/g) handles gaskets, grips and bumpers; polycarbonate (£0.17/g) brings serious stiffness and heat resistance to around 110°C; and for the hardest-working parts there's carbon-fibre PETG (£0.18/g) and carbon-fibre nylon (£0.38/g), our strongest material. PLA (£0.06/g, in 22 colours) is the budget pick for low-stress parts. The full comparison is on our materials page.
Each part can be up to 325 × 320 × 325 mm in a single piece, and layer height is your lever on cost: 0.20 mm standard is the default, while 0.24 mm draft is a sensible saving on batch parts where fit matters more than surface finish.
Your questions, answered
Is small batch 3D printing cheaper than injection moulding?
For 5 to 100 parts, almost always — because there's no mould to pay for. A moulded part costs very little once the tooling exists, but the mould itself is a significant upfront cost, so at low volumes it never pays for itself. The crossover depends on your part — if your quantities are heading well past the hundreds, email [email protected] and we'll say so honestly.
Can you 3D print 100 identical parts?
Yes — and because we're a single-printer workshop, all 100 come off the same machine with the same profile and settings, which removes the machine-to-machine variation you get when a job is spread across several printers. What we won't claim: FDM printing is not injection moulding, so expect visible layer lines and the normal character of printed parts. If any part fails our standards, we reprint and reship it free.
How many copies before quantity discounts kick in?
Five. Extra copies of the same part get 5% off from five copies, 10% from ten, 15% from 25 and 20% from fifty — applied automatically on the quote. Extra copies also have a £2.70 floor, so on very small parts the per-copy price is already at that floor and the percentage tiers make no further difference. One part is still a perfectly good order; the discounts just reward the batch.
How long will a batch of 50 or 100 parts take?
It depends on part size, quantity and what's already in the queue. As a rough anchor: the printer runs about 10 hours a day, so 50 copies of a one-hour part is roughly a working week of machine time, plus whatever is queued ahead of you. The quote page does this sum properly — it calculates an estimated dispatch date from the live print queue and shows it before you pay. After dispatch, Royal Mail Tracked 48 takes 2–3 working days (from £4.49), and Tracked 24 aims for the next working day.
Got a batch to price?
Upload the file, set the quantity and watch the discount apply itself — full price and a realistic dispatch date before you pay a penny.
Price my batch