Shapeways, one of our favorite 3d printing services, just tried an experiment by raising the price of one of their bestselling products from $25 to $45. That’s not so strange in the business world, but the unusual thing about it was that they were completely upfront about their reasons and posted it in their blog.

Not all experiments work out and they’ve rolled back the price to the original $25, but one comment from their blog sums up one of the issues we all have when pricing both jobs we do for others and products that we design ourselves:

“I think you’re breaking an unspoken social contract that there is a meaningful relationship between the value of something, and the price.”

Is that true? How do you figure out the “Value” of something, above and beyond the cost of making it? And how do you reconcile that with things like this $485 replacement wood volume knob for audio equipment?