3D printers are coming down in price but everything’s relative – you’re still looking at $$$ for even the “cheap” versions. Or you could just upload your design to Shapeways. With a few limitations, pretty much anything you can create in a 3D modelling package can be created (it still feels weird to say “printed”) and delivered direct to your door.

If you don’t want to start from scratch they have a range of template designs on the website which you can personalise with your own text but for complete flexibility you can upload designs created in modelling packages like Google Sketchup.

You have a choice of materials and pricing is directly related to the type and amount of material needed to create your design (but not the complexity; it’s the same amount of work to produce a straight cube or a complicated mechanism). The small models start down in the $10 range going up to $100+ for larger objects.