We are in discussions with a company that builds robotic grinding equipment. They do not sell their hardware, they lease it.
Carbon 3D does the same with their 3D resin printers. You lease it for 3 years. I think they were the first resin printer 10 years back but now there are other. Not sure how they compete today as their competitors sell their printers for less then Carbon’s lease. IDK, maybe Carbon has something they don’t.
Not really any different than leasing a vehicle or a computer which has been around for decades. Depends on the companies Finance Dept preference as to which they prefer, but this now puts the outlay of cash for expensive equipment as an expense over time which is 100% deductible the year it occurs vs. a large one-time capital expenditure that must be depreciated over a number of years.
The one difference between hardware and software is if I don’t like the terms on hardware, its easier to move to a different product. Software often locks you in. So if the industry is going to move to subscriptions, then file formats need to be mandated to be 100% open. If I want to move from Onshape to Solid Edge, then all data on how the model is contructed should be available. It would be up to Solid Edge in this case to be able to convert the features into Solid Edge features but it should require reverse engineering the file format to do it.
We (Hendrick Motorsports) had an SLA resin printer 20+ years ago. It cured the resin with a laser instead of DLP, but very similar technology. It was massive and I’m sure massive expensive. I saw SLA’d intake manifolds and valve covers that actually saw track time at tests.
Year 20+ years back at a medical company we had an Objet Polyjet (Resin printer). Built in layers like FDM. Big machine, something like 4’ x 6’ and about 4’ high. If I recall it cost around 300k…but it was near 25 years ago.