Need 5 to 100 of the same part? That's small-batch 3D printing — no tooling, no mould.

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.

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 small three-printer workshop is the right fit for your volume, or whether it's time to think about tooling.

Every part in your batch is printed with the same profile, the same material and the same settings, so part 47 comes off the plate the way part 3 did. If matching matters for what you're making, say so in the order notes and we'll keep the whole run on one printer, which removes the small machine-to-machine differences a mixed run can show.

We'll be honest about the flip side: we're a small UK workshop with three printers, not a hall of them. That's exactly why the quote page shows the date we aim to post your order and the latest date we promise, worked out 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 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.

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), carbon-fibre nylon (from £0.35/g) and PPA-CF (£0.86/g), the strongest we run. 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 and the economical choice for batch parts; finer layers add machine time to every copy, so save them for parts where the finish shows.