In recent years, 3D printing has developed significantly and can now perform crucial roles in many applications, with the most common applications being manufacturing, medicine, architecture, custom art and design, and can vary from fully functional to purely aesthetic applications. 3D printing processes are finally catching up to their full potential, and are currently being used in manufacturing and medical industries, as well as by sociocultural sectors which facilitate 3D printing for commercial purposes. There has been a lot of hype in the last decade when referring to the possibilities we can achieve by adopting 3D printing as one of the main manufacturing technologies. Utilizing this technology would replace traditional methods that can be costly and time consuming. There have been case studies outlining how the customization abilities of 3D printing through modifiable files have been beneficial for cost and time effectiveness in a healthcare applications.

There are different types of 3D printing such as fused filament fabrication (FFF), stereolithography (SLA), selective laser sintering (SLS), polyjet printing, multi-jet fusion (MJF), direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), and electron beam melting (EBM). For a long time, the issue with 3D printing was that it has demanded very high entry costs, which does not allow profitable implementation to mass-manufacturers when compared to standard processes. However, recent market trends spotted have found that this is finally changing. As the market for 3D printing has shown some of the quickest growth within the manufacturing industry in recent years. The applications of 3D printing are vast due to the ability to print complex pieces with a use of a wide range of materials. Materials can range from plastic and polymers as thermoplastic filaments, to resins, and even stem cells.

Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did (...) Just as nobody could have predicted the impact of the steam engine in 1750—or the printing press in 1450, or the transistor in 1950—it is impossible to foresee the long-term impact of 3D printing. But the technology is coming, and it is likely to disrupt every field it touches.

— The Economist, in a February 10, 2011 leader

AM technologies found applications starting in the 1980s in product development, data visualization, rapid prototyping, and specialized manufacturing. Their expansion into production (job production, mass production, and distributed manufacturing) has been under development in the decades since. Industrial production roles within the metalworking industries achieved significant scale for the first time in the early 2010s. Since the start of the 21st century there has been a large growth in the sales of AM machines, and their price has dropped substantially. According to Wohlers Associates, a consultancy, the market for 3D printers and services was worth $2.2 billion worldwide in 2012, up 29% from 2011. McKinsey predicts that additive manufacturing could have an economic impact of $550 billion annually by 2025. There are many applications for AM technologies, including architecture, construction (AEC), industrial design, automotive, aerospace, military, engineering, dental and medical industries, biotech (human tissue replacement), fashion, footwear, jewelry, eyewear, education, geographic information systems, food, and many other fields.

Additive manufacturing's earliest applications have been on the toolroom end of the manufacturing spectrum. For example, rapid prototyping was one of the earliest additive variants, and its mission was to reduce the lead time and cost of developing prototypes of new parts and devices, which was earlier only done with subtractive toolroom methods such as CNC milling and turning, and precision grinding, far more accurate than 3D printing with accuracy down to 0.00005" and creating better quality parts faster, but sometimes too expensive for low accuracy prototype parts. With technological advances in additive manufacturing, however, and the dissemination of those advances into the business world, additive methods are moving ever further into the production end of manufacturing in creative and sometimes unexpected ways. Parts that were formerly the sole province of subtractive methods can now in some cases be made more profitably via additive ones. In addition, new developments in RepRap technology allow the same device to perform both additive and subtractive manufacturing by swapping magnetic-mounted tool heads.

Additive manufacturing in combination with cloud computing technologies allows decentralized and geographically independent distributed production. Cloud-based additive manufacturing refers to a service-oriented networked manufacturing model in which service consumers are able to build parts through Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Distributed manufacturing as such is carried out by some enterprises; there are also services like 3D Hubs that put people needing 3D printing in contact with owners of printers.

Some companies offer online 3D printing services to both commercial and private customers, working from 3D designs uploaded to the company website. 3D-printed designs are either shipped to the customer or picked up from the service provider.