3D printers and laser cutters are significantly cheaper now. Also those and CNC machines, people can use them for business like you send them the file and they ship you the item. Laser cutters people use for custom engraving, they just buy a bunch of blank keychains, coasters, etc off alibaba and make them on demand. You can find tons of these stores on etsy (people will just steal the models for popular characters and print them out on demand for a profit), here's a more expensive one. Or like my family, print out warhammer 40k models instead of buying them because it's literally cheaper.
Also these they might not have bought them new, like our university will rarely get rid of equipment to free up storage and because it's so specialized and so few people know how to get access, you can get a really good price. We had two rooms of printers that we had to get rid of because students kept breaking them and it was too much of a pain to keep them running. We also bought new milling equipment to upgrade the shop and got rid of the old stuff which was working fine.
Did you check if your city will take them? Sometimes you need to go a specific dropoff site but usually they have instructions for household hazardous material