We were having the local college print things for us for $150/pop. For double what we paid we could have gotten a lightly used Stratasys which is the same printer the college uses.
https://www.3dhubs.com/best-3d-printer-guide is a pretty up to date guide on what the good printers are today.
Care to expand on this? I've been playing with the idea of buying a couple very nice 3D printers and starting a 3D printing company. I think a lot of people have been burned by the consumer-level printers or simply need bigger or higher quality prints. What are you guys printing? Do you feel $150 is a fair price? What is the turn around time? What materials? Does that include delivery?
My gut feeling is a local company with local delivery and quick turn-around could be more tempting that going with one of the web-based providers who take days.
Being cheaper isn't going to win you a ton of business, imho. Being faster or better or more personal, or providing unique materials may win you quite a lot of more niche business, though. For instance, for low volume injection molding, Proto Labs are hard to beat as they will do a fully automated quote and give you flow analysis for parts you upload within an hour or two (usually this takes days). Your business would need to separate itself from the other existing 3d printer providers in order to have good success.
Buying a fleet of cheap printers [one or two at a time based on demand] makes more sense because the business model is renting and there's a lot more of a market for renting a 3d printer at $5/hour than at $30/hour. More printers means more peak capacity.
Just because a new version or refinement exists, does not invalidate the usefulness of the original, nor does it mean the original users were guinea pigs.
Now when a product has zero utility in it's first version, that's different. But I would argue you should demand your money back at that point.