Economy of scale is usually the biggest reason why it's so expensive to get a single set of custom dice. 

 

Those of you reading this probably tried to get a custom dice set recently, but were surprised to see a $100 - $300 price tag attached. "Gracious!" you probably thought. "That's outrageous! I can get a set of dice for $10 at the lowest on Amazon, so what could possibly make this so expensive? It's not made of gemstones!" 

 

Most dice sets are made using molds. Most custom dice requests involve the inclusion of a custom graphic (word, logo, or other custom image) on one or more of the die faces. Which means that the artisans in charge of making the dice set cannot use a mold they already have. They have to make a new one. 

 

But you can't make a mold of something that doesn't exist.

 

This is where a master comes in. In dice creation, a "master" is a set of dice that contains the requested graphic in the requested places. It is usually produced with a 3D printer and must be sanded and polished to perfection. So long as it's made of a material that won't stick to the mold, it otherwise doesn't matter what a master looks like. It can be opaque or completely translucent. It can be neon pink or blood red. There can be bubbles on the inside. All that is important is that they contain the requested graphics in the requested places and that the masters are sanded and polished. 

 

You mix up your mold compound (usually silicone), pour it over your masters, wait for the mold to cure (I.E. become a solid rather than a liquid), pop the masters out, and boom! You have a new mold! (Hopefully, anyway. Sometimes they don't come out right the first time. Read more on molds and masters here).

 

Now you can mix up your colors and materials, pour this into the mold, wait for it to cure, and viola! You'll have yourself a custom set of dice (there's still a lot of sanding, polishing, and painting that happens after, and that's assuming you also got the dice set right the first time, but you get the point). 

 

Now is where those economies of scale come into play. A mold doesn't last forever. Molds need to be flexible so you can actually get your dice out. All that bending and flexing will wear a mold out. It will eventually become so damaged that you can no longer use it to make quality dice. You'll have to use your masters to make a new mold. 

 

But you can get a couple dozen, sometimes a couple hundred, sets out of a single mold before it goes bad. 

 

So lets say that between material costs and time, it cost $200 to make your masters and your mold. Then you proceeded to make 100 dice sets using that mold. Divide the price (200) by the number of sets created (100) to get a per-set cost. This give you 100 sets at $2 each. 

 

Now lets say you made only one set of dice using that same $200 mold. Now you have a single set of dice that's worth $200. And this is just the break-even price. Nobody can stay in business if they only make back what they spent. It's also without even mentioning the material costs of the sets themselves and the amount of time it takes to sand, polish, and ink them. In this, the same principle applies. 

 

This is economy of scale. 

 

This is why a single set of custom dice is so darn pricey!

 

This page is part of our Answers to Oddly Specific Questions series.