Very good comment, thank you. You are exactly correct on the tooling costs, except there is no limit to the high end. Ford might spend many millions on tooling

Very good comment, thank you. You are exactly correct on the tooling costs, except there is no limit to the high end. Ford might spend many millions on tooling for a new car at the extreme end of the scale, for example. I think all tool and die makers are way to used to saying "$10,000 and up" anytime you ask them about die costs. We often employ ghetto-tools when doing small runs. This means a tool carved out of cheap A36 steel that will only last a few hundred uses, or layers cut out on the laser and stacked up to make functional-but-ugly tool. Tools like this can be made from scrap laying around and some machine time - essentialy free since the costs were already sunk. Its a great way to see if an idea will work, or to make something in small runs of 10 or 50. A $10,000 tooling cost is non-starting if the total sales expected is measured in a few thousand dollars. This is why flexible tools like laser cutters are so popular. No special tooling to buy, the laser does it all. The high price of tool and die making has put most of those shops out of business or moved it offshore to Asia. What little we do for my company we do inhouse now. The problem with a laser is that everything starts to look too much 2D and too boring. "When everything is a hammer ..." Flair.co looks like neat stuff. I should count how many I need for my old house that is always the wrong temperature somewhere, with two heat/ac systems and Arizona weather :)