another great benefit of doing bulk orders is you can just fill a box up with foam beads and ship 40+ order in one go :-) or just cart them down in your car for nothing

Romel

just to supplement my hobby on fixed income

Same. Graduate student stipend sucks. I could see myself starting a 3d printing rapid prototyping business in the triangle though once I've spent a couple years really honing in my skills and using 3d printing successfully for a variety of projects.

if your doing it to make a living your going to need at least 5 well calibrated, reliable machines. with that you can turn around a 200 hour built time order in a week easy

You'd be surprised how many people actually want prints when you're the only one offering ABS at a reasonable rate. My library wants $1 per cubic cm of material for ABS printing--ridiculous hahaha. Once my printer is more perfect I'll save a lot of time. Stuff that needs to fit doesn't always require post-processing, but occasionally it does. Eventually when my printer is more accurate this will be less of an issue...

also you need to think.. what is my desired hourly rate? what do i want to be charging on average per print? how many printers do i need to be able to achieve this.

the more printers you have the less you charge per print. so aiming at schools, colleges, design houses where you sell blocks of build hours NOT individual models is where you will make a profit.

your enemy is downtime. you want to be printing out all the time.

I have given people a quote to print something and their reply is (ARE YOU Crazy) as they walk off.
So now I tell them from the start ( before looking at what they want & figuring their cost) it will not be cheap.
for a 1 off at a machine shop they would charge over $20 an hour with 1 hour minimum

do you just give them a number, or do you provide them provide them with an actual quote that has the prices broken down?  estimate the design time, material cost, setup, machine time, and assembly time, and have it all totaled up?  Showing them where the costs come from may be a good way to make them see that the material price is only a small part.   

It's the same type of thing as the people who say "why am I paying $25 for a CD when the plastic for the disk only costs $0.25?"

I used to do service and install of HVAC and appliances. done moon light service calls for extra income. had an education director customer with rent homes. he told me he didnt want to pay a service charge for each property just pay flat hourly rate with no travel fee. I said OK no service calls. next call I gave him bill with same fee as b4. he said "we agreed no service call" I said true, look what fee says. it was titled "Education surcharge" I said thats for my knowledge what to do besides labor for doing it. since he was also making a living from Education he got it and never complained again. lol