I’ve been noticing an unsettling trend in the 3D printing world: more and more printer manufacturers are locking down their devices with proprietary firmware, cloud-based software, and other anti-consumer restrictions. Despite this, they still receive glowing reviews, even from tech-savvy communities.
Back in the day, 3D printing was all about open-source hardware, modding, and user control. Now, it feels like we’re heading towards the same path as smartphones and other consumer tech—walled gardens, forced online accounts, and limited third-party compatibility. Some companies even prevent users from using alternative slicers or modifying firmware without jumping through hoops.
My question is: Has 3D printing gone too mainstream? Are newer users simply unaware (or uninterested) in the dangers of locked-down ecosystems? Have we lost the awareness of FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) and user freedom that once defined this space?
I’d love to hear thoughts from the community. Do you think this is just a phase, or are we stuck on this trajectory? What can we do to push back against enshitification before it’s too late?
(Transparency Note: I wrote this text myself, but since English is not my first language, I used LLM to refine some formulations. The core content and ideas are entirely my own.)
I have a Bambu P1S with an AMS after years of using a Ender 3 that was modified to high heavens both on hardware and on firmware level. It is a perfectly fine product and the AMS makes filament changes so much easier, it is a convenience that I personally love. My P1S is running in LAN mode and it works perfectly fine in combination with OrcaSlicer on my Linux machine. No data is send to the Bambu Cloud, everything is local.
Would I like the possibility to have a custom firmware on it? Sure, I always like options. But to be honest: My P1S runs better, smother, faster then my Ender 3 with his many mods and custom firmware ever did.
Is Bambu on my list of manufacturers for another printer purchase? Yes, but near the end after their anti consumer behavior lately.
Many people don’t care about FOSS or don’t know the benefits, they just want a NOW working product. Many belief in the goodness that nothing bad will happen, and if something happens, they still can switch. I often have this discussion with other colleagues and friends, it’s an endless debate of price , features , comfort and support. As long as there is both on the market , why argue? People can buy what fits their needs.
My opinion on bad manufacturer behavior is: if we keep buying those products(with locked down firmware, Windows-Only Proprietary Cloud filled forked Slicers etc.) more and more manufacturers may go that route.
The problem is people’s stinginess. They want to save money and buy from China. The manufacturers help themselves to the OSS community but do not contribute anything - on the contrary, the manufacturers undercut the OSS alternatives enormously. They have no development costs or anything else to compensate. So that the OSS solutions do not finance the development for other companies and push themselves out of the market, the only option is to lock it in. It’s the people who want to get into an expensive hobby on the cheap.
Prusa is based in Prague, and according to some quick googling the average software developer in Prague makes 88k CZK (~3800 USD or ~3500 eur), so about 526 CZK/hr (~22/hr in both USD and EUR).
Which means they’ve potentially spent around 76.7 million CZK (~3.3 million USD, ~3 million EUR) into their slicer. Just for salaries.
I wonder if any of that includes what are essentially firmware tuning for their printers?
I recently ran a set of prebuilt Prusa M4S for a printing demo, and they were really nicely tuned, between the pressure sensing head and the way it only probes the area of the print bed it’s going to use, all 10 printers worked pretty much out of the box. One roll of filament wasn’t sealed properly and clogged a few times, but I basically did around 800-900 hours of printing over the course of a week and had a couple clogs from that one roll.
I can only advise every first-time buyer not to choose a prebuilt but to assemble it themselves in order to learn everything directly and gain experience.
I bought the mk4 prebuild as my first 3d printer with enclodure and it worked wonderfully. Except for problems at the beginning due to wet filament etc. but it’s not due to the printer itself. Then I installed the MMU3 later when it was available.
After that I had slight problems,
especially first layer problems, which I was able to fix. then the release of the mk4s so I ordered and installed the upgrade. Initially had massive problems which I would not have had if I had assembled the printer myself and had experience.
The troubleshooting was unnecessarily time-consuming as I had practically disassembled and reassembled the printer but was still successful. At some point (after several successful start-ups and printers) I started up the printer and wanted to print something. Since it had always run smoothly before and never had any really bad problems,
I sat at the PC with headphones on until I looked at the printer and saw that it wanted to become a CNC. Printing plate damaged but still usable, nozzle damaged but could be repaired, heater and thermistor destroyed.
The support was very cooperative but of course I got the heater and thermistor replaced as they are not wearing parts.
I am still extremely happy and can only warmly recommend prusaI’d actually recommend the opposite. Unless you’re a DIY hobbyist who loves taking everything apart and you don’t want to print immediately upon receiving it, it’s worth it to buy the prebuilt Prusa. There are so many many steps in assembling a MK4S that there are that many steps to get something wrong. Better pay a few hundred extra to get one that has been assembled by a more experienced person. And I say that as a makerspace coordinator who works with a lot of 3D printers.
Assembly teaches you how incredibly complicated the assembly is. I’ve adjusted pre-assembled printers with minor inconvenience. But the first one you put together can take more than the estimated 6-8 hours.
Troubleshooting after upgrading from mk4 mmu3 to mk4s mmu3 took well over a week despite help from the Prusa forum and support and in that time I had disassembled and reassembled it several times. In the end it was quite trivial and with the help of additional tools (screw clamp to firmly fix the stepper motor of the y-axis for mounting) quickly fixed. Knowing the localization and the interaction of everything with each other would have helped me a lot and certainly saved time. But I don’t even want to deny that you have to be prepared for several hours and several hours of frustration. Instead, you have to follow the planned and most important steps with the exact number of haribo gummy bears and place them correctly on your tongue and get to the process of enjoying them as quickly as possible. If you also opt for a prebuilt, you could also use the core one
It’s a race to the bottom line. The endless plight of the working class: funnel-fed the products of each other’s work for the price of obedience. Viva La Revolution, coming this fall everywhere you stream.
Luckily for us, the original RepRap folks were smart enough to go for copyleft rather than permissive licensing. As such, the common firmwares and slicers are both using GPLv3 code, severely limiting the companies’ ability to do that.
Maybe a little out of context but this reminds me of the Sony Helldiver 2 situation. If people get loud enough they can infect change things. No one got loud or boycotted games that had Kernel level AntiCheat , this could have been avoided. Same with Bamboo I guess, if people still buy them after the Firmware and Cloud thing , it probably will happen again.
The biggest thing stopping me from doing anything is that the steps to do something are multiplicative for me rather than additive how it seems for other people. If I’m dreading fixing and tuning my printer, then I just won’t print anything. For months. Until a magic day comes when I’m able to get on with it (Yeah, I know I’m a shitty low functioning person, you don’t have to mention it). Getting a Bambu let’s me actually print stuff and helps me not get locked into paralysis about it for months. I hate it’s a closed and easily fucked over ecosystem, but it’s a choice between letting me function or not. I dunno, I’m really rambling without a point, I just thought someone might find some value in this
Just different persons / mindsets. I bought a Prusa and in the first month replaced and modded everything I know of. Stabilizing it , replacing extruder gears and the nozzle , fine tuned some print settings. Why? I have fun doing so. And the time. Other people don’t, and that is completely fine.
They try to keep it as simple as possible so that really everyone can start printing if they like to. For our luck, we got companies like Prusa and Creality that still allow modifications and have a big community.
Making them shitty, proprietary, and anti-consumer does not make them easier to use.
I’ve been 3d printing for more then a decade and the Bambu printer has been by far the easiest printer I have ever used. It is the one I well hand to my neice and nephew since it just works more often then not.
I would name Sovol as a good and cheap producer. The plain Klipper(or on older Devices Marlin)-Firmware is really nice :)
Isnt the Creality-K* Lineup also locked down?
Not really. They were going that way but backpedaled after having it made clear that they’re never going to be BambuLab. I have a K1C. It gives root with an on-screen disclaimer. The only real challenge is that it overwrites everything when updating. It’s Linux though, so, if I spend the time, once I setup my home server, I should be able to automate reloading the config.
Not at all. In fact Creality seems quite open for a Chinese company. There’s literally an option on the touch screen menu to enable root access. That gives you full SSH access to everything on the board, no hacks or jailbreaks needed.
The firmware is Klipper based, mostly open but there’s a few binary bits. There are some open source firmware forks but the one thing they haven’t got running yet is the bed pressure sensor so you need to add a separate sensor for leveling and z axis zeroing.
However the stock firmware works great and with some open source scripts you can add whatever you want to it like fluidd/mainsail.
My k1 Max has lived its entire life on a private network segment, only internet access it gets is NTP to set the clock. It’s perfectly fine. I have never registered with Creality cloud nor has the machine tried to force me too. I use orca slicer and feed it the g code and it works great.
The K1 has root access and you can use whatever slicer you want. They are probably not the best machines if you want to install plain clipper though.
I build an original voron 1.0, reused the parts to build a 2.0, and built that into a 2.4 with mostly newer parts because the frame was just fucked from all that nonsense. I have a very low serial from back when they did that on the subreddit, not sure if that’s still a thing
Even with the raggedy frame it was a great printer. But building it properly it’s bulletproof. Costly but if you want a forever printer that you can mod it’s the way to go imo
My 0.2 Parts are on the way.
Thought about buying the upcoming Sovol Zero but i guess its the time to build my first Voron :)
Which kit? I’m finishing up mine soon.
Its mostly Fysetc but some other parts as well. I spend the first half of my day building but i make a break now to get some fresh air
Nice. I went Sibor with the CNC kit for an… odd reason? It needs to survive repetitive van transport.
It is simply an entry level thing. You will find this in every market.
In a bike shop retail market I can sell you a serviceable bike for $500 that will last, or an $800 road bike you’ll actually ride. Still the majority of bikes sold come from places like Walmart where they are made of unserviceable junk and are mostly nonfunctional. These are rarely ever ridden and often thrown away. In the shop I’ll sell 20:1 on the cheapest model to the next options up the ladder.
It is strange to adapt to this kind of understanding at first, like just how skewed the real market is. I can target selling to clubs and teams but I can’t touch the the garbage bike market where most people reside.
I think we are at a point where the influx of people into 3d printing are not real Makers or have any aspirations to be.
The reality is that people are often simply stupid. They seem to think that saving a few bucks here or there is smart but are not bright enough to see that everyone doing the same thing are buying the junk product over and over. There is nothing more expensive than being a cheap miser.
Ultimately, the only person that can fix stupid is ourselves. One can only inspire others to learn but can never force them. You cannot fix stupid in others. In the USA, stupidity is political currency and we have a long tradition of poor education and standardized exploitation. It is the American dream.
I think LDO and Voron are the only super relevant open source torchbearers.
well put
Is it a price thing?
In my opinion Bambu Lab is a high-end consumer 3D-Printer and still modding, servicing etc. is bad. On the other side of the price-spectrum Anycubic copy-pasted all the bad stuff from Bambu.
It is more complicated than just price. It is ultimately an intuitive self awareness and scope thing. People lack depth to understand the details or ask others that do understand before they make a purchase. The majority of people are more oriented towards interpersonal interactions and experiential aspects of life in their fundamental functional thought. They struggle to see detail and nuances or question fixation and biases.
We still live in the early era of human tribal primitivism when it is quite easy to exploit tribal stupidity on multiple fronts. For some it is fixation from initial exposure or emotional brand perception, others it is impulsive availability, for others they are masochistic misers. Abstractive thinking and understanding is rare in humans, and the majority do not understand it or value it in others.
Walmart bikes are targeting misers first, but spontaneous availability and access, along with controlling the perception of what the low bar of the market is are major factors as well. Each of these three factors exploits a specific niche. Walmart is a rogue wholesale distributor selling directly to consumers using massive capital. They are privateers (legal pirates) in the retail market as are most big box stores. Piracy has always been a nice short term business model for gains. It just happens to be true that people of today like being raided raped and pillaged so long as it is done slowly enough without violence, the ship looks pretty and the pirates wear a suit. Even worse is when pirates become entrenched as monarchs and feudal lords. This is the next step in the evolution when piracy is normalized. Welcome to neo feudalism.
It’s not. It’s the “premium” products that have this proprietary bs and branded parts trying to justify the inflated prices. The cheapest printers are all just generic clones with no lock in and mostly generic parts. Practically DIY kits only without the DIY unless something fails.
The “problem” is people just want to do stuff, they don’t want to spend hours and hours trouble shooting. And Bambu brought that to the market.
I have a Bambu A1, and yes it really is a great printer. The firmware BS is crossing a line though, and that company will not get another dollar from me. My next printer will be a Prusa or a Voron.
We have become so normalized to anti consumer behavior it doesn’t even matter anymore
Like it used to be that a videogame manufacturer charged for a dlc that was already on the game disc, you had to pay to unlock data that you technically had purchased but not licensed, and people threw a fucking fit. Now it’s like “this new tech device will only work if you insert $20 bills every 30 minutes” and people are like “oh well that sucks but what are you gonna do? I need a toaster that can send me a notification when my toast is done”
Fuck the companies that do anti consumer bullshit, fuck the youtuber dummies that normalize it because they got $50 and a free shitty printer, fuck the government that has completely failed to regulate anything, and fuck the dummies who constantly enable this nonsense because they refuse to spend 10 minutes researching their purchases and instead spend the rest of their life in credit card debt because they have $1100 in monthly subscriptions to stupid bullshit that makes their stuff work for 18 months until the company goes bankrupt, their device is bricked, and they replace it with another piece of shit that has the same anticonsumer bullshit
It’s just like everything else with technology. As soon as the “normies” start buying into it everything goes to shit. They don’t know what to look for and just buy whatever’s easiest. Once it gets that far the manufacturers can do whatever they want
It’s a three way street though. Lazy consumers are to blame for enabling but bad companies are worse for having anti consumer practices to begin with. And the biggest failure of all is our government for allowing anti consumer behavior to run rampant and not allow any meaningful regulation to go through because they’re utterly corrupted and pro corporation.
In the “normies” defense in a functional society I shouldn’t have to research every purchase I make to ensure it is not hostile against me. However, we live in a dystopia where it is necessary to either manufacture your own foss solution or research for the purchasable option (that is often just the least hostile but still fairly hostile)
Agreed. It shouldn’t be this way but it is and they should act as such. The consumers are the only ones who don’t benefit from being corrupt pieces of shit so I think it’s fair to blame them for enabling it. If they took a stand we wouldn’t be in this mess.
All the Youtubers Bambu sponsors are like, “I was terrified of 3D printing. Wasn’t that something only nerds do? Then Bambu sent me a free 3D printer and several hundred dollars and I’m telling you guys, you don’t even need a brain to use it!!!”
Just wondering, is this “trend” you’re talking about just the Bambulab situation, or are other manufacturers doing the same? I’m not super up to date on 3d printing news, so not sure if i missed more such changes.
If it’s the bambulab situation, it’s not entirely unexpected. When they started people were already worried about exactly this seeing how closed their ecosystem is. Then again, they did make a printer that just works better than the competition, and that’s in the end what attracts users.
Personally i have diy 3d printers that i built myself, really happy with them, but for people who just want to print things, many other filament printers are just too annoying to work with. Not everyone is into diy, and many people just want to make cool stuff and not care about the printer, and bambulab really made the next step towards achieving that.
So if the open source community wants to compete with that, they must make printers that are as user friendly. My diy 3d printers are like running linux. Really great and customizable if you like to work on 3d printers, and really reliable now i as an expert built & tuned them. But most people just want to buy a machine that works, and that’s not these open source printers. And as long as we just focus on making 3d printers for expert diy’ers, we’ll end up in the same place as linux is for OS’es: used by experts and for specific advanced usecases, but beyond reach for the common user that’s then stuck on systems like apple/windows that are more locked down, but actually just work without having to understand how the entire thing works.
Anycubic for example does similar things. The Kobra 3 & Kobra S1 support Network printing(via Cloud) only through there “Anycubic Slicer Next” which is a Orca Slicer Fork only available for MacOS and Windows(Windows seems to be the only up-to-date Version, Mac is broken as far as i know).
Firmware is, as far as i know the so called KobraOS, a Klipper-go fork without a Webfrontend or any way to connect to it through Orca, Cura, Prusa or else.
Haven’t heard much about that yet, indeed also sounds bad. But it’s anycubic so who cares :p.
But yeah, it’s indeed not the best trend. But it also up to open source to actually compete with this, and not just chase shiny features, but also usability…
Besides the others that were mentioned, Prusa is moving away from open source.
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/20/with-core-one-prusas-open-source-hardware-dream-quietly-dies/
I think there’s some semantic confusion with that article. That’s not what I see. There are literally kits for sale on the Prusa Site to convert your old prusa into a new Core. imho, What the ‘RepRap Open Source folks’ mean is literally every part is sourced from already available parts or can be printed. And I think this is where the article is going. The other Open Source -is Open Ecosystem. Where there may be proprietary pieces (the steel cage), but nothing about it is purposefully closed. Prusa published the full electronic and hardware schematics before the machine was shipping. https://www.prusa3d.com/page/open-source-at-prusa-research_236812/ This is also ‘Open’. Both are good. Both have valid rationale. But neither is anything like closed source, closed box, only we can touch it companies models.
Hard disagree. Prusas used to be completely open source. Now they merely have open source components. It isn’t accurate to call them open source.
Would you call Windows or MacOS open source? Both Microsoft and Apple have made parts of their OS’s open source, but that doesn’t mean the entire product is open source.
Next time I need a new 3D printer I’m either buying a Prusa or building from a kit. Bambu has nothing I can’t get somewhere else, and I’ll pay extra to have a printer that doesn’t come pre-infected with corporate malware.
I dumped my P1S + 2xAMS for these exact reasons. Printer worked great and got me back into printing after a long break. I was really not impressed with the recent hard slide into walled garden.
I don’t understand why this is such a big deal. There is no huge open source scene for regular printers. Because it’s a tool, not a hobby. People want a print on paper and move on. This gatekeeping gotta go: It’s holding 3D printing back. Bambu did for 3D printing what Apple did for mobile phones: They made 3D printing clean, simple and easy. If you want to fiddle around with custom firmware and usability hacks and cobbled together components, power to you. I’ll be over here, actually printing things.
“There is no huge open source for regular printers…”
Given the state of regular printers, I’d say this is an excellent argument that there should be! I prefer actually printing to tinkering as well, but I’ve been around long enough to watch corporate interests destroy any number of tech related things from 2d printers to search engines. Bambu and Apple are both excellent examples of what not to do as well.
Fwiw the open source scene literally got started because of a printer
Can’t wait for the thing I bought and own to suddenly cost $5 a month
For me learning about a product and how it work is empowerment. Having the right to repair and a easily serviceable device is empowerment.
Closing down the software until you don’t even know what the device is doing is gatekeeping.
Cool and there are things you can do that with even 3d printers have fun tearing it apart and flashing firmware and dialing it in just right all the power to you. Others just want to print. But the side that wants to tinker seems offeneded that others just want to print stuff.
Im offended by proprietary privacy-invading bullshit build on the work of a FOSS Community, im sorry.
I suspect an important angle, at least for Bambu Lab, is AI. That’s why they are selling printers with expensive Lidar units at a competitive price (the X1C). The Lidar data adds a key part to AI training sets: print outcome. They could use this to train more AI models to improve their own products. I believe this is why they are first pushing the firmware update to X1C models.
It’s giving me serious pause when looking at things like the new Bambu printer
I really like my x1c, but I haven’t upgraded it’s firmware yet, and probably never will, because the local features are just too good. I know I can replace a lot of the bambu cloud features with octoanywhere, but I shouldn’t have to
I installed the X-plus firmware, switched to LAN mode, blocked WAN acess at my router and use Orca slicer and honestly, I’m pretty happy with the result. That doesn’t mean I’d give Bambu a second chance after their recent moves.
Apparently the h2d is crippled if you use offline mode. No cutter or laser support
This is what I was always afraid of. With the x1c they didn’t really take away any hardware features if you put it offline and so the trade-off was acceptable. But locking you out of the physical hardware that you’ve purchased is a whole new story. Kind of like the dishwashers that require an app to do a rinse cycle.
For what the h2d costs you can get an awful lot of printer from a different brand
Honestly, if I were in the market for another machine right now I’d be taking a hard look at building a Voron. I don’t WANT a project like that, but it seems like the best compromise in the quality and capability vs price compromise. I’m told they’re working on a 600mm³ model that may really tempt me when they finish.
Yeah I’m keeping eyes on the voron.
My next printer must have the following, else it’s not much of an upgrade
- Multiple extruders or changeable tool heads
- 500mm^3 print volume
- Actively heated enclosure
- Lidar and auto tramming
- Ams like thing
- Full opensource
- Core xy. Not interested in a bed slinger
We’re on very similar pages I think.
And frankly, there’s not really too much I want to do that the x1c can’t presently do, so there’s minimal need to go buy a big new expensive printer, or build one
Free systems were expensive, hard to use, and had worse finish
Bambu came, made a better [proprietary] product
People obviously bought it
Then other manufacturers saw that they could sell proprietary products just as well and jumped into the bandwagon
I love DIY.
At home, I run and build DIY printers but you can’t deploy them in a business/production. Why? As soon as there is a printer that isn’t it just works with easy (and documented) maintance procedures the business needs to hire not only a worker but a worker who knows 3D printers. That’s bad.
Printers like the Sovol SV08 and Biqu AMS (still not launched) aren’t just there yet.
Combined with the BambuLab pricing on the A1 mini and P1S it is pretty difficult to buy FOSS.
Prusa is close with the Core 1 but they don’t have an good AMS package for their printers (their MMU lacks a enclosure/easy to deploy setup). They propably know it but don’t have the answer avaible.
Equally on the econmics side it is difficult: The BambuLab P1S killed the (FOSS) market.
If I compare a 1150€ BambuLab X1C against the 1350€ Prusa Core One I would likley prefer the Prusa product/ecosystem. With the P1S it suddently is 700€ compared to 1350€ for a machine that will produce the exact same parts with a near identical cycletime, uptime and opperating/maintance cost. The decission in favor of BambuLab is easy.
False dichotomy. There are plenty of printers that are pro-sumer and also have great documentation and are easy to use and maintain.
Name one that is competitive to the BambuLab P1S combo.
Keep in mind that the operator is an average Joe, who knows nothing about 3D-printers, with minimal training on the job to do the maintenance.
Competitive (explicitly) includes cost: If I need to pay $2k for a printer that works just as well as an $800 option it is not feasible (for a business) to spend this much more.
I could but I’m going to assume that you already know and will simply disagree.
Tell me.
Looked last week into it and concluded that BamubLab is still the best option.
Runner up was Creality. They are equally proprietary these days.
How is Creality equally proprietary? I can put mainsail or fluidd on the machine and use any slicer I so choose.
So your suggestion would have been the Creality K2 or K1C?
This. The proprietary 3d printers arent the “enshitification” of 3d printers, they’re what’s finally going to make them go “mainstream”.
Tech people need to remember how deep into these hobbies we really are, especially compared to “normies”.
Its like with computers, people go “oh well you can get a better bang for your buck on your memory by not going with apple!”. Which sounds great and everything until you remember that people don’t know what memory is or what it does, let alone how to buy new memory, or how to disassemble a computer, or where the memory goes, or even why more memory can be good for you.
I compare it to fabric crafts because I don’t know shit about them. I know (well, think) fabric is sold in bolts and that’s about it. Hell I don’t even know how much a bolt is, and we haven’t even gotten to the different types of fabrics or ways to utilize them.
The vast majority of people don’t want a 3d printer hobby, they just want to 3d print stuff. And the Bambu printers are as close to that as I’ve seen so far.
The vast majority of people don’t want a 3d printer hobby, they just want to 3d print stuff
Exactly, I like to design things and be able to manufacture them at home. I have absolutely no interest in thinkering with hardware (especially dangerous one like a 3D printer)
Incoming fabric nerd. Bolts are like the spool when you buy filament, they come in different styles, but its typically just a bit of cardboard the fabric is wrapped around for storage. Fabric is typically sold by the linear yard, and if you buy a full bolt, they tell you how many yards of fabric it has on it. Common sizes are 12yd bolts, 24yd bolts, and 30yd bolts.
Open source is a major boon for process automation in a print farm. I also wouldn’t trust ANY cloud platform with anything remotely sensitive, like product development prototypes.
Btw most would rather read your own writing rather an ai. When my students edit with ai it’s typically pretty obvious and I think it wastes everyone’s time. Also, foreign students frequently write much better than the native English ones at my school, idk why. I bet your writing is better than you think :)
I know, i just had issues to put all my thoughts together in a way that it is still readable/understandable so i gave the AI a try. In the end, it didn’t really change that much but gave it some structure and nicer wording.
