Technology
June 5, 2026
Additive manufacturing has moved well past its early reputation as a prototyping tool. Across the industries we work with, small-batch and custom production runs are increasingly happening on 3D printers rather than traditional tooling — and the gap keeps narrowing every year.
The biggest shift we've seen is in materials. Where early prints were limited to a handful of plastics with modest strength, today's engineering-grade filaments and resins can stand in for machined parts in real applications — brackets, jigs, low-volume enclosures, and functional prototypes that used to require a mold.
For small-batch makers specifically, this changes the math on what's worth producing. A run of 50 units that once needed an expensive injection mold can now be printed directly, letting businesses test an idea, iterate on the design, and only commit to traditional manufacturing once demand is proven.
We expect this trend to keep accelerating as printers get faster and material costs continue to drop. If you're weighing whether a project is a good fit for 3D printing versus traditional manufacturing, that's exactly the kind of question our team can help you think through.