Hey everyone, we’re excited to share our launch date for the AltMill.
The AltMill will launch on Wednesday, March 27, 2024 at noon, EST. You can access the order page at https://sienci.com/product/altmill/ when the page goes live.
Our livestream will be happening on the same day at 1PM EST. Please join us at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QufxkgPRxCU
If you’d like to learn about the AltMill itself and the engineering behind it, please read our Everything You Need to Know about the AltMill article.
For more information about the AltMill project, please see https://sienci.com/altmill/. If you have any questions about the AltMill, please see the FAQ.
Pricing
The AltMill will come at a base price of $2950USD/$3990CAD, which includes the table legs.
Users can also purchase the Spindle and Dust Shoe Kit for an additional $515USD/$690CAD.
The first 50 machines
As noted in past updates, we’ve jumpstarted the process by starting production on the first 50 AltMills in December 2023. This allowed us to tackle some of the major unknowns/questions, such as:
- What will it cost for us to make the AltMill?
- How difficult will it be to manufacture certain critical parts, such as the rails, linear motion, and table that we were most concerned about?
- What will our QA and assembly process look like?
- What sort of performance and reliability should we expect from the AltMill.
As of the time of writing, the plan is to offer the first 50 machines directly to select users and for internal use before our “main batch”. The first batch of AltMills represents our trial-run for production and comes with a couple of you-should-knows, especially if you’re planning to be one of the users in this batch.
We also plan to collect comments and feedback from our first batch of AltMill users to improve the user experience and tackle any initial quirks and issues in the first part of the product launch.
Some parts are still in shipping and manufacturing, and we expect the first 50 machines to start shipping in May 2024.
The “main” batch
This is what we expect most users will be part of. We will begin taking pre-orders at the end of March. Please check www.sienci.com/altmill for more information and a link to the order page.
The goal for our first main batch is to build enough units to leverage economies of scale to make our relatively low price for the AltMill viable. This not only involves the unit cost of the machine, but the work and labour needed to build each batch of machines, which might include work done to set up tooling, packing stations, and the ordering of parts.
Please note that to place your order for the AltMill, the total amount must be paid to hold your place in our queue.* You may cancel your order at any time before your order ships for a full refund. Once your order is in the possession by the courier or arrives at your door, our standard store policies apply.
The number of machines we’ll make in the first batch is still undetermined and will be based on the number of orders we get at the beginning of the launch.
We expect the “main” batch to start shipping in July 2024. However, we will ship orders based on when they were placed, which means that if your machine is in the later part of the batch, you will receive your order accordingly after July 2024.
Future production
If you feel that pre-ordering the AltMill now isn’t right for you, you will eventually be able to order and have an AltMill ship to you in a shorter amount of time, just like the LongMill. However, when this will happen is dependent on when our production capacity can meet the demand for the product, which is unknown at this point.
The goals for the future production of the AltMill is as follows:
- Have a reasonable lead time for us to build and ship AltMills. For us, two weeks or less from when we recieve an order to when it gets shipped is a pretty good number to hit, but the lower the lead time the better.
- Produce larger numbers of machines to leverage economies of scale and either reduce the price of the AltMill or invest our increased profits into additional resource development and R&D that benefits the CNC industry
- Take our learnings from this new product, especially in the production and QA side to create variations to the AltMill, such as a smaller, stouter, more rigid machine focused more on metal milling, or a larger 4×8 machine.
The size of future batches will be adjusted based on demand once our main batch has completed.
How to get updates
We will continue to share and provide updates in our Production Updates which are released at the start of each month at www.sienci.com/blog
Additionally, we will write order updates as we currently do with our other products at www.sienci.com/order-status
For the most reliable way to get news and updates, please sign up for our email mailing list.