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.)
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.
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.
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.
Edit: example about developing stats.
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 wish I could have kept one, but my OG ended 3 is still hanging in there.