Why 1Off Manufacturing Exists

We started this company because we couldn't get parts made. Not because the technology didn't exist — but because the infrastructure to support the people who needed it didn't.

A few years ago, we were part of a collegiate liquid rocketry team. Designing propulsion systems, iterating on engine components, testing, failing, and getting to redesign. All the reasons we got into engineering.

But we kept running into the same wall.

Every time we needed custom parts manufactured, we had two options: send the work overseas and wait weeks, or try to find a domestic shop willing to take on low-volume work at a price we could actually afford. The first option was slow. The second was often impossible.

Anything that fell under ITAR restrictions couldn't leave the country at all, we had to figure out how to make it ourselves. When you're a team of students trying to build rocket engines, that ranges from extremely difficult to flat-out impossible without the right equipment.

And the parts that weren't restricted? They were still painfully expensive to get made domestically. A single metal 3D print that might cost a few hundred dollars overseas could easily run 10 to 20 times that from a U.S. shop. For a student team running on minimal support and self funding, that's the killer of progress.

A bigger problem than just rocketry

That experience made us take a harder look at the state of low-volume manufacturing in the United States. And what we found was that this wasn't just our problem.

Students, hobbyists, small businesses, independent engineers, anyone trying to bring their ideas and designs from the screen to a real part in their hands was running into the same issues. The prices were too high. The process was too complicated. The lead times were too long.

The big on-demand manufacturing platforms cater to companies with budgets. They're built for purchase orders and engineering teams, not for a student building their first prototype or a hobbyist working on a weekend project. And the smaller shops? Getting a quote usually meant sending emails back and forth for days, explaining your project, waiting for someone to manually price it out.

The infrastructure to support everyday builders and creators simply didn't exist.

What we're building

1Off Manufacturing started with a simple idea: support the makers and creators who want to bring their ideas to life. We want tomake it possible for anyone to upload a file and have a custom part at their door in days, not weeks and at a price that doesn't require seed money.

Right now we have started with FDM 3D printing. You upload an STL, our system analyzes the geometry, and you get a real price in under two minutes. No emails. No waiting for a quote. No minimum orders. Just upload, pay, and we print it and ship it.

It's not everything we want it to be yet. We want to offer more materials, more processes, and faster delivery. We want to get to the point where getting a custom part made is as easy and fast as ordering anything else online. We want to make SLA printing accessible, bring metal additive manufacturing costs down to something reasonable, and eventually build the kind of domestic manufacturing infrastructure that should have existed all along.