Plastic molding quote

What is the cost of plastic injection ?

In order to get the best pricing for your plastic injection it is important to understand how the pricing is made and which are the cost impacting contraints.

Injection molds costs

In plastic injection molding, manufacturing of the molds is a very important cost. The good news is that it is a one time investment.

Plastic injection molds costs something between several thousands USD to several tenth of thousands USD depending on below factors :

• Size of the part to inject : it will impact the size of the mold.
• Number of cavities : increase the mold costs but lower the price cost.
• Life expectancy of the tooling : number of shots : the higher the number of shots the more expensive the molding steel.
• Complexity of the parts : for complex parts slides and venting needs to be added which cost extra
• Aspect of the part : high quality polished surface will need extra processing costs and maybe specific inserts (for optical plastic parts for example)

Parts costs

Plastic injected parts are usually very cheap and their quality is quite stable, but some factors impact their price and need to be considered in the design stage :

• Batch quantities : molds needs to be set up on injection press for each production this operation takes time and cost money, so the more parts done in one batch the lower the unit price
• Number of cavities, as mentioned above the more the cavities the lower the unit price
• Size and complexity of the parts, complex parts will need bigger press with more expensive processing and longer injection time.
• Materials : choice of plastic material is important as different injectable plastics have different cost.
• Deburing : plastic flash are usually present on the edges of the parts after un-molding, deburing can be done manually of with deburing tools.
• Packaging : on top of the obvious packaging costs, as plastic parts are cheap the impact of transportation costs can be very significant if they are not optimized to imbricated.