Dental 3D Printer Price: How Much Does Dental 3D Printing Cost?

When choosing a dental 3D printer, there are a few things to consider in addition to price. In general, dental professionals should be concerned with:

• Accuracy: Guaranteeing high-quality, accurate final parts is the most important concern for any dental professional. Accuracy and precision depend on many different factors: the quality of the 3D printer, the 3D printing process, materials, software settings, post-processing, and how well-calibrated all of these systems are.

• Reliability: Dental professionals run on tight timelines. Whether printing a same-day appliance or running 24 hours a day for peak production, print failures result in additional costs and missed deadlines. 

• Maintenance: Consider the types of everyday interactions and maintenance the printer will need once it is up and running. Servicing and maintenance costs can be expensive without a service plan.

• Ease of Use: There are big differences in the software used to prepare 3D models for printing, the complexity and the number of steps to set up and operate printers, the availability of post-processing tools and degrees of automation, and the resources available for learning new application workflows.

• Materials: The materials available for a single 3D printer and the ease of switching between materials affect the range of appliances it’s possible to print — one of the most powerful aspects of digital dental technologies. 

• Production Volume: It’s important to consider print setup, post-processing time, and production volume when investing in a dental 3D printer. Preparing the printer, setting up the prints in your dental software, and post-processing the parts are all steps not immediately made visible in a basic print time metric. 

We put together a free dental 3D printer buyers guide that covers these metrics in more detail. For a deeper dive into these key metrics by specialty, download white papers for Dental Labs, Orthodontics, or Dental Practices.

In this section, let’s take a look at some printers currently available and dive into their costs, which include both upfront costs and long-term maintenance costs. When purchasing a dental 3D printer, users should consider all types of costs associated with 3D printing.

The upfront costs of bringing these printers in-house varies, but higher prices for DLP 3D printers and other "made for dentistry" 3D printing solutions doesn't necessarily mean better quality or more features. Besides having the biggest installed base of 3D printers in the dental industry, Formlabs develops, manufactures, and sells printers for many other industries. This means Formlabs sells more 3D printers in a month than most dental 3D printing companies sell in a year. With that volume comes economies of scale, which Formlabs can then share with customers allowing the price to be affordable and competitive.

Formlabs manufactures our Biomed and Medical Device Resins at our FDA Registered facility in Ohio under a Quality Management System that is ISO 13485 and EU MDR certified. By doing this, we control the quality of our product while also being able to offer affordable resins. 

Labor costs are one of the areas where major differences arise. For example, Formlabs MSLA and SLA 3D printers require minimal setup and can refill resin automatically, while some DLP printers require frequent calibration, lengthy setup, and a technician to manually refill the resin and pour it back into the bottle when the printer is not in use.

Post-processing is also more streamlined with some solutions than with others. The Form 4B can be used with Build Platform Flex, and the Form 3B+ can be used with Build Platform 2. These flexible build platforms enable the quick and easy removal of parts from the build platform without tools in seconds. 

Automated post-processing units such as Form Wash and Form Cure also speed up the cleaning and post-curing process, meaning your dental workflows can go from print to final part as soon as possible, reducing completion times and labor costs.

Many dental professionals, labs and practitioners included, start their digital journey by outsourcing some of their indications. This makes sense for low production volumes and for dental professionals just getting started with 3D printing or dental CAD/CAM. However, the cumulative cost of outsourcing quickly climbs and can far exceed in-house production costs in just a few months. One of the greatest benefits of 3D printing is its speed compared to traditional manufacturing methods, which quickly diminishes when an outsourced part takes multiple days or even weeks to arrive. With growing demand and production, outsourcing rapidly becomes expensive.

Let’s take a look at a dental office that is producing 10 aligner models per day. The office’s fixed labor cost is $20 per hour, and they expect to keep the production level set all year, creating 3,650 parts in one year.

Outsourcing comes with no upfront investment costs, and each order costs $15 per part with a lead time of one week.

Under these criteria, the break even point is just seven weeks. That is, outsourcing is cheaper than in-house printing for the first seven weeks, and then becomes increasingly more expensive after that. Bringing production in-house will save this dental business more than $40,000 in a single year.

Formlabs Dental created an interactive ROI calculator so you can input the parts per week and labor costs and generate your own report to compare the cost of in-house production and outsourcing.

Some common questions dental professionals might ask when they are considering outsourcing or in-house 3D printing production:

• How many parts per week will you need? As we’ve seen, at only 10 aligner models per day, outsourcing quickly adds up to far exceed the cost of in-house production in less than two months.

• What indications will you produce? Outsourcing costs for more complex biocompatible appliances for intraoral use can be substantially higher, resulting in even faster ROI for 3D printing.

• How quickly will you need your parts? If you find yourself often with rush cases, then long outsourcing lead times can be a deal breaker.

Besides a 3D printer, what else do you need to get started? Both practices and labs generally require a scanning and software solution to complete the workflow, but outsourced design options are available for the latter. Learn more about it in our extensive guide.

Let’s take a look at some examples of costs per part based on dental indications created with the Form 4B. We’ve already established that in-house 3D printing quickly becomes more affordable than outsourcing those same parts, but how much do various parts actually cost to print?