Lifetime Design Guarantee

OSE focuses on Lifetime Design - the OSE Lifetime Design Guarantee - for most of its products.

Specific Terms

Specifying point by point how you can redeem a lifetime of guaranteed service.

Philosophy and How It Works

In summary:

1. Stewardship of resources is important for a sustainable, thriving society. There are plenty of resources available for everyone to thrive, but not if there is greed and waste.
2. Today's consumer society is based on extreme waste, where resources are extracted for a very short use cycle, ending up in a landfill. This has profound effects on wealth and its distribution, and this has profound effects on society being trapped in a high cost of living.
3. Introducing lifetime design to the equation is a solution, and this solution is enabled by open source design. Lifetime design is achieved by design - and can increase/retain value significantly.
4. Lifetime design is critical to ecological integrity, as we cannot burn earth's natural resource base for ever. Species extinction is an ongoing issue that is related directly to resource extraction.
5. To address some of these issues, we are taking a stand on making our products designed for a lifetime, and are offering a lifetime guarantee to back this.
6. First, our design is simple, robust, transparent. We make things that do not require special tools or facilities - and we use COTS parts. Thus, a user can effectively service a product even by themselves using transparent documentation - even if the business itself goes out of business. This is critical for supply chain immortality.
7. For someone to redeem the guarantee - there are 2 basic options, both of which are straightforward and effective: (1), you can send a defective part or machine back to us for a replacement if you cover shipping. (2), you can buy a replacement readily off the shelf, which in many cases may be less expensive and faster than shipping the broken part back to us. That's it - that is just about all there is to it - and you can do this for as long as you are alive.
8. But it gets better. Because our design is open source and modular, we continuously design upgrades and improvements. So when you buy a product, we gurantee to you that you have the ability to invest in that improvement - thus creating not only a lifetime of use - but a lifetime of improvement. Your product can actually improve with age!
9. And if you no longer need the product - we would like you to take it back to us or recycle it. We give you a clear option where you can redeem value for yourself in this process. Becuase we design our tools for immortality - we design them with parts that are readily reused and recycled. So if you want to redeem value for your product - take it apart and send us the useful parts, and we can pay you for them if they are in usable shape. We are creating a Recycling List where we show the values of different things, and how that value depreciates over time. Our formula is to offer you as much value as it would cost us to acquire that product on the open market. Clear and simple.

Why It Works, And Why It Is Important to Us

How it is possible for us to offer unlimited lifetime support, what is included, and why we are doing it.

3D Printer

We have designed the 3D printer for a lifetime, not planned obsolescence. That means that because the printer is open source and uses easy-to-source, off-the-shelf parts - it retains its value for as long as needed. It is easy to replace or fix parts, or to 3D print replacement parts with the same printer - for as long as one wants to do so. We avoid a situation of a part breaking down and a user not knowing how to fix it. In fact, for products other than the 3D printer, we will offer a Lifetime Guarantee program - which consists of our 3D printer, which can be used to print replacement parts. We focus on using as many 3D printable parts as possible, in order to facilitate lifetime design. Initially, printing will be done in thermoplastics, and after further development - in metals and ceramics such as Geopolymers.

OSE intends to produce the plastic that it uses in its products only from the waste stream, thereby cleaning up the environment. This has the benefit of saving the energy, resources, and pollution that it would otherwise take to make plastics from raw resources, especially from petroleum.

To sign up for OSE's Lifetime Guarantee, email us to get the package. It requires work on your part: for example - to guarantee that you can use your machine for a lifetime, you need to start by printing replacement parts as the first use of your machine for practical production.