u/Desperate-Row2705

our infrastructure costs have been increasing as more services move into kubernetes, and it’s becoming difficult to balance cost optimization with developer productivity. we’ve tried autoscaling, smaller workloads, and cleaning up unused resources, but clusters still end up overprovisioned because teams want reliability and fast deployments. curious how other devops teams are handling things like workload optimization, idle resource detection, smarter scaling, environment scheduling, and visibility into which services are actually driving cloud costs without creating friction for developers or slowing delivery.

Researching injection molding companies based in the US. I've narrowed my choices down to Quickparts and Protolabs.

The project is a small ABS electronics enclosure for a handheld device. Roughly credit-card sized, two piece, snap fit, screw bosses, thin walls 2-3mm, cosmetic surfaces, and needs a clean fit between the top and bottom shell. Main concernis avioding tooling issues, sink marks, poor fit, or expensive changes after review.

Which vendor is the best for this if I'm doing a low-volume first run before committing to larger production?

Part details:

Material: polypropylene, likely PP homopolymer or copolymer
Approximate size: 120 mm x 60 mm x 12 mm
Eight circular vial pockets
Thin ribs between each pocket
Small raised ID numbers molded next to each cavity
Slight draft on the vial pockets
First run: roughly 250 pieces
Potential follow up run if fit and quality are good

Biggest concern is the combination of thin ribs, vial pocket consistency, and warping. I don't want to spend money on tooling and then find out the trays rock on the table, the vial pockets are inconsistent. I’ve looked at Protolabs but I’m also comparing other options like Quickparts, Fathom, and Uptive.

Thoughts?