Pricing & FAQ
Don't see what you need? Email us at sales@touchstone3d.com.
General Information
The best way to get in contact with us is to email sales@touchstone3d.com. Send us a message describing what you're looking for and when you'll need it by!
You can also call us at 919-535-9895 during our working hours.
We're open Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm.
We offer a free one hour consultation to discuss your project and identify how we can best help you. We'll decide whether you need New Product Innovation services or Prototype Design and Fabrication services and issue you a Statement of Work.
Our minimum charge for any prototype or scope of work is $150.00.
If you're looking to take an idea from concept to commercialization, we recommend using our New Product Innovation Services. We'll create a plan and navigate through the design, development, and deployment phases together.
If you have specific prototyping needs for an existing design, or need help turning your design into a prototype, we'd recommend Prototype Design and Fabrication. We'll work with you to understand your critical to success requirements so that we can deliver the prototype you need, when you need it.
Prototype Design and Fabrication
Please send all design related photographs, technical documents, contextual literature, dimensioned drawings, and CAD files to sales@touchstone3d.com with a brief description of your prototype function and application.
All of our prototypes start with a CAD file. If you don't have one, we can make one for you. We'd also recommend looking into our New Product Innovation services if you're looking to turn your prototype into a product.
While we can work with most file types, we prefer STEP or STP files. This allows us to create high quality STL files for 3D printing, DWG/DXF files for laser cutting, and toolpaths for CNC machining.
Designs for mass production can include features or geometry that aren't suitable for prototyping methods. We work with you to understand what is critical to the success of your prototype and adjust your production design to work with prototyping methods.
Yes, there are many kinds of prototypes and we can help you identify what will suit your needs. For example, there are very basic models, such as appearance models. These don't have any functional aspects, but show the product form, color, textures, weight, etc. There are also cosmetic prototypes, which look and function just like production units. For more information on types of prototypes, check out "What we Make" found here: http://www.ts3d.co/prototype-design-fabrication/.
Prototype costs depend mostly on complexity, materials, and surface finish. Simple components may range from $30 - $60 per part, and full blown, functional prototypes could cost several thousand dollars. Reach out to us at sales@touchstone3d.com to get your project quoted today.
New Product Innovation Services
We offer a product called Innovation Services to progress our client's projects from idea to production. Some clients come to us with a working prototype and others just a napkin sketch.
We issue a series of short duration, well defined, fixed price "Statements of Work" to progress our clients through design, development, and deployment phases. We offer advice and guidance from a product development perspective and help match our clients with mass manufacturers to help get their products into production.
We recommend all new product ideas start with a Product Development Plan. This plan outlines the client's vision for the product, market, and sequence of use. As a team, we identify any design and technical challenges and put together a step by step plan with estimated costs from start to finish. We also include basic estimation tools to aid in business planning and funding strategies.
This Product Development Plan serves as the road map for the product's Design, Development, and Deployment activities.
In our experience, we've seen small, simple products make it to market between $30,000 and $50,000. This includes design and development, manufacturing tooling and start up, packaging, marketing materials, and the first production order. Of course more complicated products will cost more, but there are ways to go about acquiring more funding.
Many of our clients use crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. More traditional routes include seeking bootstrap funding from friends and family, and then seeking angel and seed round investments later on.
How long a product takes to get to market depends mostly on complexity and funding. A simple product may take 3-5 months, where as something more complicated could take 1-2 years.
The client’s availability for collaboration as well as their ability to secure funding play the biggest role in how long it takes them to get to market.
