3D printing was once the pursuit of the most dedicated nerds on the internet. These people built machines from scratch using off-the-shelf parts and 3D prints, figured out what materials they could repurpose and extrude by experimenting, and improved the process piecemeal by swapping out components.
The 3D printers of today have come a long way.
Modern assembled printers are cheap and bespoke
No need to tinker, even if you want to
Buying a printer from a brand like Bambu Lab or Creality now means spending a few hundred dollars on a pre-assembled machine that “just works” when you take it out of the box and switch it on. Most of these companies manufacture their machines in vast quantities, with Bambu Lab in particular taking full advantage of the economies of scale to do so.
This phenomenon is far from unique to the 3D printing world, and the playbook is one we’ve seen many times over. Bambu Lab gained its current market-leading position with solid early products that captured as much market share as possible. As the market share grew, so too did the company’s name and reputation, which has led to accelerating sales. The more printers you sell, the lower the per-unit cost becomes to build them in the first place.
Then there are companies like Prusa, which still manufactures its printers in Europe and the United States, rather than in China like Bambu Lab. It was one of the last major 3D printer players to open-source hardware and software, a practice that ended in 2025, with the founder claiming that “open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead.”
In a blog post, Josef Prusa outlines his reasons for moving to a new community license, much of which was predicated on the fact that the company’s 2016 MMU1 multiplexer was patented by someone else. The founder of Prusa Research offered a sobering look at the cost issues the company was facing: “We first realized something is off when the price of the parts is higher than the sale price of a complete machine in some cases.”
Prusa remains one of the more expensive consumer 3D printing brands, despite being one of the more tinker-friendly offerings. The company is known for providing upgrade paths in the form of user-installable kits, and even sells its printers as full self-assembly kits at a cheaper price point.
This is what happens when niche tech goes mainstream
People just want to print
Tim Brookes / How-To Geek
Tinkering for most 3D printer owners has become far more pedestrian. It now involves adding accessories like a multi-material system as per Bambu Lab’s AMS 2 Pro, switching out nozzles, fitting a TPU assist module or extractor fan to the back of a printer, or changing print beds. Sometimes it’s making 3D printer upgrades at home. Many of these “upgrades” come from the same company that manufactures the printer in the first place.
It could be argued that this is to be expected, but the convergence around bespoke printers and locked-down ecosystems has been rapid in nature. Bambu Lab is arguably one of the biggest catalysts for this change, but the company only launched its first printer in 2022.
Bambu Lab rapidly built a name for itself for making 3D printing accessible. It normalized quality-of-life improvements like automatic bed-leveling, and its Automatic Material System (AMS) wasn’t the first of its kind but is widely seen as the first to work as advertised. The Bambu ecosystem expanded rapidly, the mobile app proved to be a hit, and the MakerWorld repository has replaced Thingiverse as the go-to place for sharing and downloading models.
Is it any wonder that many draw comparisons between Bambu Lab and Apple? Despite seemingly similar goals from both usability and business perspectives, its price strategy sets it apart from Apple. It took Apple decades to even consider cheaper product lines, whereas Bambu Lab aggressively undercuts the competition. A newcomer looking for value for money, who just wants to print items rather than tinker, can’t help but be tempted.
I should know; I was one of them.
Benchy go brrrr
The RepRap project emerged right as 3D printing at home was becoming viable. The idea was to build a replicating rapid prototyper that could be used to print itself with only a few off-the-shelf parts. The RepRap project gave way to some of the most famous 3D printers of all time, including the Prusa i3.
Once a hive of activity, the RepRap forums are relatively quiet these days. There are a few holdouts who still maintain their 15-year-old machines, while others have moved on to more experimental fabrication techniques. For many who are serious about shunning the mainstream 3D printer market, Voron Design appears to have taken up the slack.
There’s also a contingent of 3D printer enthusiasts who have dedicated time and effort to breaking Benchy world records. In 2026, the sub-minute barrier was broken by an open-source machine called the T250, which you can build yourself.
Tinkering with 3D printers, building your own from scratch, and angering companies like Bambu Lab by attempting to expose open-source license breaches will probably always be a thing.
The main difference now is that tinkering is optional, rather than necessary. For those who just want to print, it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
