If you have ever fancied yourself as something of an amateur inventor or designer but never seemed to have the resources to make your vision a reality, your day may have finally arrived.

Shapeways, a new internet-based 3-D printing service, offers rapid prototyping at an affordable price. Send in your digital design file and Shapeways will ship your polymer prototype in less than ten days and won’t charge you an arm and a leg. According to Shapeways, most orders cost between $50 and $150. Shapeway’s proprietary software ensures the design can be built and tweaks small errors in the design before production. Amazingly, Shapeway’s advanced printers can build objects with moveable parts and the clincher is that the price isn’t determined by complexity, but rather by the amount of polymer required.

3-D printing’s uses are virtually unlimited. Small businesses and startups can order prototypes for potential customers, artists can have a new medium with which to play, friends can create their own unique gifts to give, and prosumers can whip up a redesign for a company.

In an age when Starbucks’ die-hard caffeine addicts spend hours combing mystarbucksidea.com for ways to improve a business in which they have no professional stake in, it’s not a stretch to see similarly devoted customers producing actual mock ups of improved products for a favorite brand. But will it really catch on?

Cornell University engineer Hod Lipson thinks so. He told MIT’s Technology Review that he thinks people will eventually have these printers at home.

Could the democratization of 3-D printing technology be for prosumerism what the Gutenberg press was for literacy?