How Invisalign became the biggest user of 3D printers

Tangential, but I have sleep apnea. Fortunately I have it mild enough to get away with a mouthpiece instead of a CPAP (which is good anyway because I also have bruxism).

The mouthpiece works great and I would recommend everyone get tested for sleep apnea if your insurance covers it, but I have to admit that paying for it bothered me. Even with insurance covering some of it, it cost me about $600.

I know that there's a deceptively high amount of engineering required for these kinds of things, but it was very hard to wrap my head around paying $600 for what amounted to a couple pieces of clear plastic. I actually got them to send me the STL of the scan of my teeth, and some back of napkin math indicated that it would have cost me about fifteen cents of resin to print it out myself. Instead I'm paying about 4000x that price.

Obviously this is not apples to apples, I'm sure they're using different and/or better resin that what I have, and as I said there's probably engineering and fine-tuning for this, but even still it was not fun to pay for.

All the same, I sleep like 10x better, so I suppose that considering that $600 is a cheap price to pay.

So shouldn't this really be something that could be opened sourced. I think I've seen a few write ups of people that did their own, but seems like a highly functional implementation could be democratized.

Most teeth align themselves as kids age. This is almost never necessary.