Experience with PLA vendor

I thought it would be helpful for people to share their experiences with their resources ie: availability, price, shipping speed, quality of product, customer service, etc.
Each of us has individual needs and requirements, mine are specific to making sculpture, which are going to be slightly different from an industrial designer, etc. I am mostly looking for natural color 1.75mm PLA and I have not been measuring the true filament diameter. So if your requirements are unusual, please help us understand your specific requirements and how they might affect your experiences.

So I'll start with my (limited) experience:

Makerbot Industries, poor availability, limited range of colors, $48/kg, excellent quality, marginal customer service (except in the NYC brick and mortar store where they are very helpful)

ProtoParadigm.com, good to poor availability, good range of colors, $45/kg, filament was OK but packed too tight on the spool and had 2 breaks, no response to request for customer service

MatterHackers.com, good availability, good range of colors, $38/kg, received but haven't tried their filament yet, fast shipping

3Dprinter Supplies JetPla (via Amazon.com) good availability, good range of colors, $38/kg, good filament, no problems.

SainSmart, good availability, limited range of colors, $37/kg (a few are less), fast shipping, the print quality is great and I have not had any issues with it jamming. I have printed a roll of Green and a roll of Red, no issues on either..

JustPLA (via Amazon.com), good availability, OK range of colors, $35/kg and up, fast shipping, received but haven't tried it yet.

Online Filament (via Amazon.com), haven't tried

Octave (via Amazon.com), haven't tried

the good news is that since I started looking around the prices seem to be dropping.

hi,
its a shame you state side [www.faberdashery.co.uk] never gone wrong with there's. good quality, excellent costumer service,

I have never had anything but good results with the 3mm PLA from Ultimachine. I've also had good luck with their ABS, but with a much smaller sample size. Their prices are comparable to other vendors, and they have a reasonable color selection. I'd like to see some new colors though.

This is Alex from ProtoParadigm.

I'm sorry to hear about your problem. We had an issue with our contact form a while back (see blog post) and didn't end up getting messages from some people that tried to reach us. I'm guessing you tried to reach us during this issue.

We had a batch in which some units were wound improperly. Your experience is abnormal. We take customer complaints very seriously and make sure problems are taken care of. We are constantly striving to make our products better and we can only do this with feedback from our customers.

Please contact form again and we'd be happy to take care of you, and again, I'm sorry for your experience. If anyone else had a similar experience, please do the same.

I'd also like to note that our pricing is different from what you mention there. Our 2lb spools are normally $38.50 for either material, either diameter. Right now we are doing a summer sale and have our 2lb spools marked down to $32.50 while we're trying to make some room in the shop for some new products we're working on.

Happy Printing!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2013 12:16PM by alexenglish.

What is your website URL?

Reprapworld ~17€/kg(w/o shipping) limited colors, had responses from emails(about missing thermistor datasheet, its there now) shipping took ~3days, afaics no problems with quality.

waitaki, our website is www.protoparadigm.com. Thanks for asking!

Jet PLA, 3mm Blue

[www.amazon.com]

Has performed well and looks good, EXCEPT: I'm about 2/3 through the spool and I've had 3 prints ruined because the extruder jammed due to crap in the filament.
Here's the latest contaminant. You can see it's rather too large to fit through a .4mm nozzle.
It was fast because I have Amazon Prime, but in the end it isn't worth it. Next time I'll be patient.