For anyone considering alternatives: You should know that almost all other 3D printers expect you to know a little more about how they actually work than Bambus. Bambus are as close as you can get to a "just works" type experience, but modern alternatives from others are nowhere near as hard as they used to be.

The closest "easy" alternative is probably Prusa, but you'll pay significantly more for a Prusa machine than you would a Bambu. They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness. If money is no object, Prusa is highly recommended.

Beyond Prusa, there's a lot of other options. https://auroratechchannel.com/#section2 This list is a good one.

I personally run an old Elegoo Neptune 4 pro - but my needs are quite low. If I were buying today, a Snapmaker U1 or the Creality K2 Plus is probably where I'd end up going.

> We have documented incidents of service outages caused precisely by spikes in unauthorized traffic - overwhelming the servers, causing service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users.

So it's a problem that their printers are popular, and they can't be bothered to scale their infra, so let's gate everything based on USER AGENT STRING! This is so crazy of an excuse that I don't believe it.

That’s not impersonation. That’s Bambu discovering that user agents are not authentication.

Still I suspect it is about spying in wartime, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the main reason even Ukraine is winning since januari 2026.

First China prevented Ukraine from using any of the drones that they sold in millions to Russia while exercising the built in kill switches in Chinese drones used in by Ukrainians.

Suddenly Bambu, another Chinese company started listening in on the 3D printing on a massive scale in secret factories all over Ukraine that make the drones to replace the Chinese drones. Very suspicious.

Whatever is the reason Bambu locks down software or firmware on their 3D printers, now is the time for programmers to change the situation. We need to put up money like Louis Rossmann did [1], not to fight legal battles but for a assembly language programmer to reverse engineer the Bambu firmware and make a free and open source version.

This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.

A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.

Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLLVn6XT7v0

P.S. I would be willing to do the reverse engineering but I would need at least 35 euro per day (to eat) to build a new firmware for all Bambu models from scratch. I would need a few different models of printers on loan for a few weeks to test the new firmware. I estimate it would take 5-9 months to rebuild firmware for all models from zero and release it. Maybe Rossmann and Geerling could use their influence and coördinate this freeing of the firmware?

I just emailed Rosmann and Geering to see if we together can free the Bambu firmware. Anyone who wants to help, please contact me trough my HN profile.

I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry. I have only used OrcaSlicer to tweak my models, mess with parameters, and send the prints to the printers.

So other than Bambu getting all heavy-handed with a legitimate open-source fork of their slicer software (which is definitely not okay), I'm not sure I'm clear on what the kerfuffle is about. Are their printers now MORE locked down than before? Or maybe only certain models?

Bambu Studio is literally a PrusaSlicer fork. You don't get to build on the community and then threaten it.

They are offering a cloud infrastructure that allows users to remote control the printer via their software. If they don't want users to use a non-approved software to access their cloud, they should just build auth around it and explicitly tell people that. The accessibility for users to utilize the printer without going through official software and cloud is a whole other can of worms of course.

This whole fiasco could have been avoided by not being so confrontational, giving their user base ideological ammo.

Bamboo not understanding the OS licencing when they themselves took from Prusa if I remember correct is pretty rich.

This for me was the most telling.

Previously I bought an Ender printer for around the same amount. Never did get it to work. I'm not an engineer or a mechanic. I have other technical hobbies, astronomy for example. I tried making a telescope mirror with results similar to the Ender printer. I buy ready made telescopes, not telescope kits.

I have immense admiration for those who can and will make telescopes and 3D printers. I'm very interested in the base technology. But when I want to print something, or look at a faint fuzzy, I just want the system to work.

(Interestingly, I actually like star hopping, the process of finding an observation target with a finder scope and star charts. Go to telescopes have no interest for me. Go figure ...)

To me this seems like a failure of the U.S. corporate/economic system. We should be able to make a 3D printer that simply works. We should be able to make a drones that work as well as the DJI drones. (My understanding is that Bambu Labs was started by a group of former DJI engineers.).

I don't have any solutions here. Not buying a Bambu Labs printer means I don't get to print things in 3D. I would pay more, but whenever I look into the various alternatives that I'm assured are turnkey, they turn out to not be turnkey. And if my Bambu printer breaks I can generally buy a new one cheaper than paying someone who knows what they are doing to fix it.

I'll admit this kind of offends my geek sensibilities. I actually agree, at least emotionally, with Geerling. But I also agree that the U.S. military industrial complex should be able to make excellent consumer facing 3D printers.

If I were doing commerce with the 3D printer I almost certainly would be using something else. Maybe. For what its worth, I'm basically printing out puppet mechanisms and art figures. Occasionally a wall hook or missing part for something that I happen on a STL file for.

Louis Rossmann has decided to put himself in the crosshairs instead, with a video goading Bambu: https://youtu.be/1jhRqgHxEP8?si=BwfoCKxujd0XwNJ0

Here's what I don't get. How is infra load any different between someone using their slicer build, and someone using their code in another slicer (or a fork)? It's still (ultimately) the same human making the same requests. If they can't handle the load then the solution is to obviously carefully manage the supply of the printers, if your infra is incapable of handling more than 3 users (accurate figure going by the tone of their blog post), then don't have more than 3 of your printers in the wild at any single time. Problem solved.

Like when you think of the App/Play store lockdowns, the new ReCaptcha attestation stuff, and other things that have a more authoritarian angle to it as of late, you can at least see how it happens: most of their consumers aren't technical and don't even know how to argue against it or why they should care.

With Bambu on the other hand, I'd think a good portion of its customers do actively care about this kind of thing. 3D printing just doesn't have the same market reach as computers and smartphones.

Also, it seems to me like there's eventually going to be a turning of the tide on all of these pushes (app stores included) and companies that are making these kinds of moves aren't seeing that writing on the wall.

Anyways, yeah, my next purchase will be a Prusa.

The receiver of the C&D should see a lawyer about what changes or user-facing messages might get Bambu to back off. This is a normal, solvable business disagreement, not an excuse for everyone to get their pitchforks out again.

Also: I run multiple Bambu printers offline and they all work fine via sneakernet without anyone's files going anywhere. People should stop acting like these devices are bricks when used without internet access.

1. OrcaSlicer: so it's a fork of Bambu's official client, Bambu Studio - but it apparently still goes through Bambu's servers for printing? How exactly does that work? Does it also "impersonate" the User-Agent, and Bambu was okay with that?

2. OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?

I think the primary problem is actually more than just Bambu's behavior, it's that China is an authoritarian country, and most of the population not only accepts the idea of central servers monitoring and "moderating" behavior but largely may embrace it as a sensible thing to do. It's probably beyond Stockholm Syndrome to the point of much of the culture genuinely not completely even understanding the idea of why privacy and personal control is important.

Much of the United States is so far on the other side that they can't begin to understand the position Bambu is in. Large companies in that country just do not have the option to allow their users to bypass censorship and monitoring.

I do think it's actually great that this type of issue gets in everyone's face though and it's great people are fighting back. But realize that the problem is deeper than one company. It's the whole type of government and attitude towards it and technology.

He was right.

I'm a confused about the whole "3D printer sends prints to its manufacturer's server" issue. Because I wouldn't want to connect hardware device like a 3D-printer to a network in the first place.

Can I buy a Bambu Lab printer and just never hook it up to any network?

Will I be able to print from sd-card just fine?

Can I update the firmware from an sd-card?

If these two are possible, I would not have any problems with such a device. If they are not, I would not even think about getting such a device.

And when it comes to slicing software: Can I use any slicing software and all I have to do is load the hardware info of the Bambu Lab printer I want to use? Or do I have to use Bambu Lab Studio or a fork like Orca Slicer for some reason?

And while we are at it: Does command line slicing software exist? I wouldn't want to dabble with a GUI. I would want to define the parameters of a print job in a yaml or json file and then slice it like "./slice.sh config.yaml myobject.stl"

Money is a bit tight, so I decided against prusa as my first printer.

I am curious if anyone has good experiences with alternatives for the p1s with regards to ASA printing?

Serious question: why not just release whatever you want but not tie it to your identity? Bambu demands OcraSlicer make changes under threat of litigation? OK, cool. Enjoy the 5,000 forks of OcraSlicer that implement that functionality in exactly the same way. Hell, post a notice that they were compelled to remove the feature, and that they're thereform removing the release x.y.z, with the sha256 hash of "...".

Now OrcaSlicer has complied, and the community has an semi-official way to make sure that the commits that were removed aren't modified when they get them from other sources.

You buy this, you "vote" for this.

The open alternative exists. It costed more, but I saved a bit more and got it.

Vote with your wallet, where and while you can.

I don't see the ground the OSS community are standing on to demand Bambu provide free services.

Surely people can check the traffic and build a server to answer similarly, no? Or is this much more than job management?

Maybe this is impossible and I'm talking out of my ass, but for me it seems like a perfect opportunity to completely remove the problematic party from the equation.

https://gamersnexus.net/fk-you-bambu-lab

This will be the only legal way to own a 3D printer if WA HB 2320 or CA AB 2047 are passed. If you don't like it, call your representatives immediately.

I love their 3d printer. It "just works" like none I had before it.

But now they've killed their 3d printer business and all their stuff is absolutely dependent on their web services. So that thing is up shit creek without a paddle whenever they flip that switch.

It really hurts to think about replacing an expensive, WORKING thing just because it became abandonware.

What printers are similarly priced and have similar specs, for someone relatively new to 3D printing?

The Chinese government subsidizes Bambu Labs, so it's pretty easy to understand why this is such a big deal for them. It's not like the CCP wants to democratize manufacturing. They want the data.

Which degraded their hardware usability so much, that it's literally much worse than a decade ago. Even basic functions like choosing which speaker should play or ... what content to play does not work properly.

Just another company to avoid by now.

That said none of this is surprising. Bambu Labs have been very candid about their playbook which is following Apple's lead. They want to be the Apple of printers, a very walled garden with high integration good UX and not a lot of freedom because they want to tightly control the full experience.

And that is going to alienate a lot of people and endear a lot of others. The only reason they've even paid lip-service to open source or open hardware is simply to get a foothold in an industry that had strong roots in that area. Now that they're a more established brand we should expect them to start bricking in the garden and adding controls.

Fortunately I think they've been a net-good for the printer landscape, they shook things up pretty hard and I think there's now more competitive models from other brands.

New product launches by them feel less exiting (I don't want/need laser engraving capabilities in my 3D printer) and I agree with other commenters that these days, there are good alternatives. Unfortunately I have to say that wasn't around the time I bought the printer. When you just wanted to print things without making 3D printing a hobby, their machines were a no-brainer!

But yeah, bye bye Bambu Lab.

Only thing that's more annoying than their blog posts trying to "set things straight" is the "we told you so" crowd.

same for breach National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)

My understanding is that right now, you can run your printer in LAN or USB mode without Bambu's cloud, and this is supported natively by OrcaSlicer (or any slicer using USB), but you lose some of the Cloud monitoring features.

You can also use Bambu's cloud with their Cloud Connect app and gain those monitoring features while using a third-party slicer, but at the expense that you send your prints through their cloud.

Or, you can use Bambu Studio and get the "fully integrated" experience.

My understanding is that this plugin just replicated their Bambu Studio communication with the Cloud, and that it _enabled_ you to send your prints to their cloud, not _disabled_ it. Is there something I'm missing that made this valuable? (ie - did it do some hybrid where it could hack in the Cloud monitoring without sending the prints through the Cloud?) Otherwise, I think what Bambu are doing are distasteful but I don't understand all of the Chinese espionage hand-wringing or "stealing our files" commentary around this.

EDIT: I finally got to the bottom of this; there is a cloud-based RPC method called `bambu_network_start_local_print` where Bambu's Cloud would authorize a print using (ostensibly) only locally transferred data. The goal of this project was basically to pretend to be the Bambu plugin in order to authorize this method, which is otherwise locked behind Bambu's auth system. This makes more sense. I wish the commentary on this subject would actually explain this.

Having said all that, the hardware is very good. Software, not so much.

Bambus p2s and their ams2 pro have had more hardware reliability issues in 1 month than is normal

Wayyyy more than my p1s and ams combo

I think there’s also some issue in their firmware that needs to be rolled back or perhaps properly tested

Gonna sound harsh :

This isn’t a printer anymore … it’s AI slop

The Bambu printers work. Imagine the difference between windows XP and OSX. Do you guys remember the insane breath of fresh air it was to get a computer which just worked?

That's Bambu. Yeah they aren't open source there's all sorts of telemetry, etc. Nobody cares because they really just want to print things.

Bambu has every right to restrict or limit how their cloud service is used, even if they do it in a completely insecure and trivially reproducible way (a user agent).

I'm curious from a legal perspective - the user agent in the Bambu slicer is AGPLed, so copyright wise it seems anyone could put it in their own slicer too. Nonetheless, something feels wrong to me about saying you're a Bambu slicer when you're actually not. Bambu is going after it because of the user agreement, but is there any other legal standing for complaint?

I think we should go to court and beat Bambu into submission here.

Do such people really exist? Are there actually people who are comfortable blindly starting a robot in their home, with a part that heats to 150 C, and then hope that everything will work out and when they get home the part will be waiting for them, instead of the firefighters?

I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.

Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.

Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.

To me, the problem with all of this is that it seems strange to want the plugin when bambu will just shut off their resources to unsigned versions of the network plugin if the orca slicer dev got their way.

I'm open to being convinced but I just don't think the cross-section of people who want this would actually want prints going through bambus cloud so this effort really feels vain.

It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.

Their cloud infrastructure obviously has real costs associate with running it, and I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources.

If you buy something and then significantly modify it, you generally tend to void the warranty - and that's not because companies are just greedy; there are real limitations when it comes to a company's ability to support the endless ways a product could be modified.

Publishing something as open-source does not imply that you must operate an optional-but-complementary service at a loss for charity.

What phone and laptop does Jeff use?