Bob Winans (rwinans@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> Just out of curiosity how much did the cut sheets cost you?
It actually is not that easy to tell :)
Cutting cost + Material were about 40 USD according to the ponoko.com
website (I did not yet see the credit card invoice though). Shipping was
free due to a promotion from ponoco. I actually did cut some other stuff
as well, in total the site stated a invoice value of 63 USD.
Customs however assumed that "$" refers to NZD and hence the customs
stuff seems to be a bit lower than the actual price. However, since the
invoice (obviously) did not state any shipping cost, the german customs
office took some magical shipping cost from some magical table: 110 EUR
(Yikes!) of which 79% apparently contribute to the customs-value as
well. I ended up paying customs for 119.65 EUR (6.5%: 7.78 EUR) plus
Import sales taxes for a value of 150.53 EUR (19%: 28.60 EUR) - I have
no clue where this number comes from actually. Apparently the customs
value multiplied with some magical factor.
Summa summarum: additional fees of 36.38 EUR plus a 20 EUR "service fee"
for the import handling by TNT.
This dodgy math at least doubled the price. No, I won't do it again
unless ponoko has a contractor within germany... :-/
Which of course sucks, because the service itself rocks.
This makes it a way more expensive case than I planned, but at least I
learned something (the hard way).
Given that the benefit of the lower sheet of the insert is not that much
you could do two identical inserts and get two for the price of 40 USD
at Ponoko. Which makes it more reasonable. I am also pondering about a
modular system which would allow being more flexible with the insert and
might be more plastic-efficient, but this is thought-experiments for
now.
Bye,
Simon
--
simon@xxxxxxxx http://simon.budig.de/