How Extrudinaire Started: When Filament Costs Became the Problem

Extrudinaire didn’t start with a business plan, investors, or a big vision for industrial manufacturing.

It started with curiosity.

Fresh out of high school and new to university, I was shown the 3D printing workshop on campus. Like a lot of engineering students, I was instantly hooked. Watching digital ideas turn into physical objects felt like magic - and I knew almost immediately that I needed a printer of my own.

So, with my limited savings, I bought a FlashForge Creator Pro.

At first, everything was exciting. I printed constantly - small parts, experiments, failures, improvements. I was learning fast, iterating even faster, and pushing the limits of what my machine could do.

Then reality kicked in.

The Hidden Cost of “Affordable” 3D Printing

It didn’t take long to realise that filament was expensive. Really expensive -at least for a student.

Every spool felt like a decision. Every failed print hurt. Large parts were basically off-limits because burning through kilograms of filament simply wasn’t realistic.

The printer itself had been relatively affordable, but actually using it at scale wasn’t.

That was the first moment where the gap became obvious:

3D printing was marketed as accessible, flexible, and revolutionary, but the economics didn’t add up once you tried to do anything big.

I wasn’t limited by ideas. I wasn’t limited by software. I was limited by material cost.

So I printed less. I became conservative. I stopped experimenting the way I wanted to.

And that never sat right with me.

Questioning the Status Quo

Instead of accepting it, I started asking questions:

Why is filament so expensive? Why does material cost scale so badly with part size? Why are we repackaging industrial plastics into small spools and calling that “manufacturing”?

The more I looked into it, the clearer it became: filament wasn’t the material - it was the bottleneck.

Industrial manufacturing had never relied on filament. It relied on raw material, bought in bulk, processed efficiently, and scaled properly. Pellets, not spools.

That realisation planted the seed.

From Frustration to Extrudinaire

Extrudinaire was born out of that early frustration, the feeling that additive manufacturing could be so much more if it stopped pretending to be a hobby and started behaving like real manufacturing.

The goal wasn’t just to print parts. It was to remove the constraints that stopped people from printing at scale.

Lower material costs. Higher throughput. Industrial materials without industrial prices.

What started as a uni student trying to stretch a spool of PLA turned into a focus on pellet extrusion, large-format printing, and rethinking how additive manufacturing should work when cost actually matters.

Why This Still Matters

That early experience still shapes everything we do.

Because if material cost stops students from experimenting, it stops startups from iterating, and it stops manufacturers from scaling. And if 3D printing can’t scale economically, it never reaches its full potential.

Extrudinaire exists to remove that barrier.

Not because it’s theoretical, but because I hit it myself.

Written by Eli Gomez-Kervin