A few thoughts from me, as a printer-haver who occasionally buys traditionally produced miniatures:
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I got into printing because I like cool sculpts, not to save money. Far and away the most interesting sculpts to me are not being made by traditional miniature companies. There are probably some reasons for this: maybe digital mini design is less limited by production requirements, or by gaming systems, or by budgets, or marketing, or so on.
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After 27 years, I’m really sick of building miniatures, and especially scrapping moldlines. 3d prints are very often one piece (or a few pieces if too big for your printer), but even better have no moldlines because they have no molds. Sure, supports can leave little pegs and stuff to sand or scrape away, but it’s nothing at all like traditional production. A few companies have tried prebuilt (The Other Side, A Song of Ice and Fire, etc) and even then I find myself either scrapping moldlines or having to steal myself and ignore them. Just not having them is a dream come true.
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I spend a lot on digital files, and I’m sure many printers do. Before my printer, I had throttled my new miniature spending way down, now I spend $50+ USD a month on Patreon and individual files, every month. This is probably comparable or low compared to some gamers, but for me it’s a lot annually, especially on top of hobby supplies and printing supplies and traditional minis.
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I agree that gesturing to GW’s pricing is an easy way to call 3D printing the cheap alternative, but most mini options compared to boutique plastic pricing is going to look affordable! Two sub-thoughts on GW:
– GW makes the best hard plastic wargame kits on the market. Honestly, they deserve the prices they charge for them, especially once you experience the world of boutique resin outside of the GW bubble.
– One of the actual problems with GW pricing is that it’s totally out of alignment with the games they’re used for. I’m not a price complainer when it comes to GW, however I’ve also been totally priced out of 40k at this point. A 2000 point army is so expensive, for how poor the game experience is, that I can no longer justify it as a casual player. -
Printing an entire army takes a long time, at least for me and my little Mars Pro. If my goal is painting and playing, there’s a lot of literal labor that goes into getting to those steps. Honestly one of the reasons I buy minis still is because somebody has done all the casting for me. Plus I like cast resin, and the manufacturers I buy from (Mierce, Mantic, Creature Caster, Privateer Press) have largely moved to and grown their skills in in-house resin.
EDIT: I just wrote a massive sixth bullet about the future of printing once Amazon makes a convenient, cartridge-based, app-driven resin printer plus GW signals the time for holding out is over and begins double-dipping on their 3D sculpts, but maybe that’s too far in the future 
Suffice to say, we’re in a strange time right now, in what feels like the twilight of traditional gaming miniatures but is absolutely a golden age for 3D sculptors.