Evidence you can inspect. Assumptions you can change.

Our evidence hierarchy

OEM sources describe a product or qualified material process. Third-party sources are labeled separately. Federal awards describe a transaction. Your measurements and quotes belong to your scenario, not the machine database.

Review dates mean what they say

Review dates identify when the cited source was reviewed. Genuine third-party corroboration is identified separately. We do not replace a source-review date with a page-build date. A linked source is evidence to inspect, not a blanket warranty that every product remains orderable.

Unknown means unknown

Machine and powder prices need current supplier quotes. An absent value is not zero. Utilization depends on your actual schedule and process; there is no universal number. Conflicting evidence is kept visible until it can be resolved with a source.

Independence

Manufacturers can buy visibility. They cannot buy the answer. Any sponsorship must be disclosed and cannot change calculator results, machine facts, rankings or comparison outcomes. This policy does not imply that sponsorships have been sold.

Corrections

Send the affected page, field, source URL and source date to [email protected]. We check the evidence before changing a claim and preserve the original record. An OEM request alone is not proof of a fact.

The calculation

The calculator is a pre-tax LPBF cost comparison. It models production capacity, attempted-part costs, cash flows and a separate accounting view. It can recommend outsourcing. It neither estimates a market machine price nor qualifies a part.

Limits

No automatic inflation, working capital, tax treatment, production replacement, quality assurance certification or financing approval is modeled. A fixed overhead assumption must cover the required fleet. Uncertainty is explored by scenario changes, not a statistical confidence interval.

Related methods