You could do a dozen small parts at Protolabs for $50k, and that would get you through a small run of finished parts. But Protomold's tooling is proprietary and

You could do a dozen small parts at Protolabs for $50k, and that would get you through a small run of finished parts. But Protomold's tooling is proprietary and non-transferable. You don't own it, or get to see it. You would have to start fresh (with different design rules) to do a large scale production run. Which means a project like this could end up a victim of its own success.