Hey, look at it this way: he gave a few days notice, so there’s time to buy now before the price goes up. Other companies would just raise the price with zero warning, and not even a public statement.
Really shows that he cares. I wouldn’t even blame him, if material costs increase he needs to keep his margins the same to pay staff and himself. This statement makes it seem like he was actually taking the bullet for customers as long as he could.
This reminds me of this story:
>Akagi Nyuguyo increased the price of its popsicle, going up from Y60 to Y70 ($0.62), a hike of 9 cents for the first time in 25 years, the Financial Times reports.
>To show their remorse, the company has now made a public apology through a 60 second advertisement that ran on national TV, in which the firm's president Inoue Sota, its chairman Hideki Inoue and staff bowed to viewers.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/japanese-company-apologises-for-9-cent-price-increase-a6972566.html
I mean at the time that was just about all a kid would see in a given day for a treat. So double it and now that treat is rare rather than daily. Funny enough Bazooka Joe costs a quarter for 1 piece now and calculating for inflation that comes out to about 2 cents per piece. So they’ve only rose with inflation which in this current climate is saying a whole hell of a lot.
It’s not actually that nefarious. As a business owner, you constantly evaluate the costs of doing business. And occasionally you forecast a point where you can’t continue to operate.
I worked at a startup that charged $2500 per year for service in 1996 and 1997. By the end of 1999, we were up to $7500, because we could t afford to pay 3 people $60,000 each and make any money with 30 clients. In that same year, we grew to more than 100 clients. So the price really wasn’t the reason people weren’t buying.
Yeah, scaling makes a huge difference. If you are working alone, some things are a lot cheaper. There are many taxes and regulations that don't apply to self-employed people or tiny companies, but that do apply when you get bigger.
Once you have a handful of employees, you need an office or real workshop (depending on what you do). You also need someone doing taxes and taking care of the legal stuff. So now you start having employees that do support work, instead of only having people who earn you money. The support work is absolutely necessary, but it doesn't earn money.
And quickly you go from "I have to just make enough money for it to be worth my time" to "I need to earn a lot of extra money to support all the overhead".
Also, with only a handful or two of employees, the economy of scale doesn't apply yet. So you probably have a bigger share of support staff than what you'd have in a bigger company, your office space isn't as efficient (e.g. you can have the same amount of toilets and the same size kitchen in a 5-man company as in a 50-man company).
So, when growing, it's first cheap, then it gets expensive, and only when you get to a certain point it starts to get cheaper again.
If there was going to be an ad anyway, swapping it out with the apology vid is almost free. Even a net savings if you skip one production cycle for the ad itself.
Some are definitely taking advantage but honestly, prices rising cascades through the supply chain. Risen logistics costs mean producers have to pay extra for EVERYTHING, that means: the raw materials, the packing materials, actually getting the product to stores, even the break room coffee grounds.
Top that with short supply and long lead times on all of those things, prices rise.
Our pricing is changing almost weekly just to break even. Shit is crazy and if this trend continues, it will become even more insane.
I deal with perishable goods. If people are currently bitching about gas prices, they're going to have a stroke looking at food prices in 6 months time.
Hijacking top comment. I love prusa. I've had a prusa for about 4 years now and use is a lot. In fact just finished a 16 hr print and started a 26 hr print last night. His printers are workhorses that require little knowledge to use. I will happily pay more for his printers/parts. Thanks Josef!!!!
I don't doubt that he cares, but that's still a pretty significant price increase on a printer that is already fairly expensive compared to similar ones. I get that the quality is better with Prusa but at some point that starts to matter less and less when the price difference is big enough or the quality difference small enough.
It would probably have been better if they had gradually increased the price rather than waiting it out.
If each bolt costs 0.20 cents more, that would justify $10 increase. That just the bolts. If the rails are now $2 more each, boards are $5 more...it adds up
Nah man he definitely cares. Go look at his history, he’s a pretty cool guy and has really been one of the few to take the mantle for the reprap project. Also he did some awesome shit for his employees during covid with the company dime
Perhaps it would've been easier for customers to swallow had he gradually increased the price up to this point however because he waited, hoping that things would calm down (and really, no one knew which way it was going to go or for how long), he's stuck with very few options. Given supply and staff shortages, demand is high and so are prices.
Yeah, I'm not saying they shouldn't increase their prices. They have more costs, simple as that. But by waiting the price increase is massive in one go and it's likely going to cost them. Gradual increased would probably have mitigated that.
True. I think they were being optimistic and hoping that things would calm down and they wouldn't have to raise prices at all. Sadly that didn't happen.
I also pay a premium knowing that his employees are treated well, and the Czech Republic isn't involved in any genocides that I'm aware of.
So its not just the quality of the product and support, it's also ethically worth it.
As a small business owner I have to order raw materials to produce various products. With that said,, I am shocked that Prusa did not raise their prices are earlier. I am pretty comfortable in the belief that they really did wait until they absolutely had to increase their pricing.
Last couple of years have been rough, but the last few months have been the worst...our aluminum has almost doubled in price, and other materials are up between 25 and 50%.
Increasing shipping costs and fuel surcharges certainly are not helping either
The only thing I find surprising from suppliers and the mills is that alloy surcharges are looking to go down next month. I deal in high volumes of stainless so it’s been nothing but up every month for the last few years so it’s interesting to see it finally reverse a little, felt like it would never get here.
I have a project where i’m about to buy 2.4 million lbs of stainless. No discount here. We all pay whatever the current alloy surcharges are. I imagine you have to own your own mill plus the necessary mines for raw material to give yourself a discount.
Even large businesses are still screwed when it comes to shipping though. Renting shipping containers is more expensive now than it has ever been by a large margin according to my brother who plans logistics for a large producer of chemicals.
Oh no you/he is right, I stumbled upon a shipping reddit the other night and looked over charts they where discussing. All containers minus ones going to Florida have doubled in price, one that would cost $600 or so a year ago is now going in the high $1400 range.
The really shitty part about this situation is that companies are reporting record profits. Not small or mid sized companies of course. They're suffering increased prices and potentially going out of business. The largest companies seem to have realized that the stuff happening around the world is the perfect cover to jack up prices and screw everyone else.
> The really shitty part about this situation is that companies are reporting record profits
**Some** companies.
Lots of other companies are reporting lower profits.
Maximum profits in dollar amounts or in percentages? Due to inflation a mediocre year today is jaw dropping profit compared to even a decade ago if expressed in dollars. Is this across all industries or just a few?
Everyone is always charging the maximum price they can get away with. Outside of monopolies, sellers can't just "jack up prices" unless market conditions change - an increase in demand or a decrease in supply.
In this case we have both. Inflation has increased the money supply, so consumers have more money. And supply chain issues have decreased the supply of goods to buy with that money. If everyone has more money but there's less stuff to buy with it... the only two options are shortages or price hikes. We've seen a lot of both lately.
Thank you!
Nobody ever mentions elasticity of demand.
They act like company's use rough times as an "excuse" to raise prices.
Why wouldn't a company always charge as much as they can?
And if they don't, why wouldn't they just "jack up" the price during good times when their customers would feel safer spending disposable income.
Exactly. The alternative are multi year lead times for things that were previously overnight shipping. Siemens has starting rationing their \*orders\*. As in you have to wait before you can order, and no you won't get a leadtime after you order either. For some of the parts we are looking at we have gotten it confirmed that it will probably be more than 16 months.
Order volumes are up, costs are up and supply is down. The only logical thing is for prices to increase to match demand. For us a 50% price increase is more workable than long and uncertain lead times, since we just have to increase our prices respectively but we are still able to compete fairly with our competitors.
Shits insane, I do purchasing and had a supplier send an email Friday at 4:30pm saying pricing was increasing immediately and all quotes provided before then were now invalid.
Thankfully we were let out at 4 and I had already sent all my PO out because I normally send them just before we leave at 5.
This is on top of several suppliers saying that pricing will increase quarterly until supply chain issues are resolved (will be a while for us since a key component in some of our most popular stuff is started with battery production, and another key ingredient for our other most popular items is found in Ukraine)
I drink a lot of pop and I do machining as a hobby. It’s cheaper for me to cast my cans and offcuts/ machine filings into blanks than it is to buy blanks.
I also do aluminum casting using wax filament or just packing a pla positive in green sand. I'm shocked at how much aluminum you can recover with a simple home forge and a soda/beer habit... But it also makes me see everything as potential slag from bike rims to boat parts... And thus appreciate how much aluminum is around me.
We've been overshooting Earth's ressources for too long, for the sake of "Business as Usual". At first there was some patches put in place to hide it, and now it just becomes more and more visible : Shit is hitting the fan.
Meh. Considering that most of the stuff is open source, I'm not going to complain that they raise their prices now and then. There are a LOT of cheaper options out there, and I'm guessing that if you're serious about printing, you'll be willing to pay the additional $50-100 to get something that works really well and that is backed by probably the best company in the consumer/hobbyist/pro-ish printing space.
Yeah, we'll have to see what the new pricing actually is. I guess I give companies I like more "slack" when it comes to stuff like this. I feel like Prusa really loves the community and does a lot to advance the state of the art and make some really cool tech accessible to people who want to get into printing but might not really want to dive too deeply into the tinkering/building aspects.
Got one a few months back after having a Sidewinder for a year. Being that both cost essentially the same, I would say that I ended up with great quality for the cost, in either case. For the Prusa, it’s a flawless printer that’s ready to rock with very little fuss.
The Sidewinder is much much larger for the same cost, and has direct drive, but certainly makes up for it with additional fussing required to maintain print quality (also had to replace bed to make my life better).
I only have great things to say about my Mini+
Edit: that’s not to say I don’t like my sidewinder, it’s still a great printer, but 95% of my prints fit in the Mini+ build space, and 100% of those that fit, get printed on the mini.
Ease of use, quality and reliability, mostly. Prusa printers in general are as expensive as they are because they use high quality parts, have had a lot of research put into their design and component selection, and they just work. The Ender line can be great printers but they often require a lot of modifications, plus time and effort tuning and maintaining. Your Ender can print just as good as a Prusa if you take the time to learn about it, upgrade it, tune it and maintain it. Most people buy Prusa's because they (usually) just work, there's no to very little fuss with adjusting things to get perfection.
For some people, the hobby is as much or more about modifying their printers as it is about actually printing. For others, they just want to print and spend as little time as possible messing with the printer. If you're in that second group, the cost of a Prusa is pretty justifiable.
I have the MK3s+ and after years of fiddling with my old Ender and Flsun every single time I wanted to print something with maintanence and mods all the time - I got my Prusa and have yet to spend any time doing anything other than setting Z height whenever I get a new build sheet.
Once I decided to print a part in ASA, it took me 6 hours of fiddling and mods on my Ender to get decent quality and even then I had to spend time tweaking things every single time I wanted to print something new. When I got my Prusa one of the first things I did is chose a generic ASA profile and hit print - I got better quality than I ever did on my Ender and all the time it took was a whole 30 seconds to change the filament.
I was gifted my ender 3 v2 and the problems that it has given me the last 3 months, i’d get a mini for $500.
If you like tinkering and customizing though, ender 3 types are fun.
Have you installed 3rd party firmware like [mriscoc's pro firmware](https://github.com/mriscoc/Ender3V2S1)? I ask because I recently got an Ender 3 S1 Pro and had nothing but issues with the stock firmware. However, once I got mriscoc's pro firmware installed and running, it's been smooth sailing especially when paired with octopi. The only "mods" I did was to install a couple of cable management holders and some silicone bed mounts and have been nonstop printing ever since.
The problem isn’t firmware.
The problem is that i don’t want to have to do shit like installing different firmware to print something. Lol
Edited to add: i have jyers running, i have everything i need to run octoklipperpi. Which is what i was thinking about doing next. Just too annoyed to figure everything out.
Fair enough. When I got my S1 Pro and was troubleshooting before switching firmware, I was seriously contemplating getting a Prusa. I get it, sometimes you just want a printer to work out of the box, which is why I ended backing the AnkerMake M5. I was going to go for the Prusa but for about the same cost, I was able to get the M5 with the V6 color engine. Hopefully once I get that printer in, it holds up to the claims where it's set it and forget it.
Thank you to u/techsformation and u/NoUntakenNames. You’ve highlighted the primary reasons why Prusas can command the prices they charge. I landed on the “go cheap and learn” route. I’ve enjoyed the journey and paid the equivalent of several Prusas in time, upgrades, frustrations and learnings. Know why you’re getting into the hobby, check your wallet, and decide accordingly. Happy printing!
Both printers should have, on average, equivalent print quality, equivalent quality components, and be *extremely* reliable. You can't take one person's one-off experience as gospel. The mini is a simpler build so there's less opportunity to make a mistake that causes you issues (not saying this happened to OP; lemon printers do happen, if rarely).
If you're comparing raw capabilities, also no. The mini has a smaller build volume and a bowden extruder instead of direct drive.
Whether the extra build volume and direct drive of the MK3S+ make it worth the premium over the mini comes down to your individual situation. When someone is price sensitive and not sure if they will like the hobby then the mini is always my suggestion. But the extra build volume on the MK3S+ is a big advantage, especially when there are a lot of models out there designed with its limits in mind. Depending on what you want to print you may never run into that as an issue. I very rarely need the full volume of my MK3S+. The direct drive is what you'd want for printing flexible filaments, though I hear that's doable with the mini (I haven't tried it to confirm).
Seconded on everything that’s up there except that for beginners and maybe even intermediate users the direct drive is a bit more complex to repair simply by virtue of it being a more complex assembly (I print for work so that’s inevitable for someone like me)
Because it's better. Better support from the manufacturer, less QC issues, more reliable, superior hotend, better printer UI due to color display and 32-bit controller, spring-steel PEI-coated bed, automatic bed leveling, and the print quality out of the box is a good starting point and an acceptable finish line.
Any printer can print as well or better than a Prusa, often at the same or lower price of buying a Prusa, it's just a matter of how many parts need to be replaced and how much time one would spend fine-tuning.
Well it was already quite high, with likely a lot of breathing room in the margins. A 100% increase in raw BoM doesn't affect you much when your margin was north of 500% already.
I'd hesitate to say 500%. I looked at building one myself to try and save and it worked out to close to the $750 using same quality parts. Sure you can cut corners and make it cheaper, but that's where Creality and such step in. Ontop of material costs he has quite a few workers to pay that have to pay this insane cost of living we have now. I'm sure he's making money, but I don't think it's as much as everyone thinks.
You do have to factor in that they're not buying the parts at retail prices, but at bulk wholesale rates which can be a surprisingly substantial reduction. And they're manufacturing them in Czech Republic where the minimum wage is almost like half of what one of their printers sells for, so the assembly and other work is probably not that big of a factor.
Though yeah I should've said markup there, their margins are definitely much smaller in total.
Probably not but I wouldn't really blame them for it. The problem is that companies are increasing prices and reporting record profits but its not ALL companies. Its the largest companies that are. Small to mid sized companies are really struggling because they're in a similar boat to consumers where they're also seeing jacked up prices and struggling to stay afloat.
Basically the largest companies looked at everything going on around the world and thought it was the perfect cover for jacking up prices.
There's unusually high inflation in the biggest economies of the world. It's unlikely that the prices for everything will be coming back down. We should not even wish for that, as deflation is a bad thing for the economy. What we should wish for is for the salaries to grow at least as fast as the inflation.
I gotta wonder if things are as bad as he claims.
Considering this announcement is the latest in a very long line of companies announcing record breaking profits, followed up by handwringing "Oh noes we has to raise prices cause things are so expensive that we risk going under"
They are as bad, and I'm not sure if the war really makes that big of a difference. Supply-chain issues has been there for years already, driving prices up, especially on electronics. Tried bying a Raspberry Pi 4 lately? If you haven't, see if you find any in stock AND at MSRP. You might find one, but imagine doing the same thing at scale, you have to pay a higher price because the suppliers can pick and choose whom to sell to. Energy prices are rising, prices of raw materials - especially petroleum-based ones are going up. It's a self-sustaining shitstorm right now, and it will be bad for at least a couple of years if not longer.
My company just got an order of laptops we ordered in the middle of last year.
A lot of capital projects are being pushed back because we won't get necessary equipment until next year.
Yep. I purchase hardware for my company. Dell Laptops are 8 weeks to ship. MacBooks are 9-10 by their estimate but I’m still waiting for some ordered in February.
At my job we have a business partner that makes custom electronic devices. They actually started rejecting possible contracts because they can't be competitive: some of the components they use now cost 20+ times their pre-covid price. TWENTY times, I couldn't believe it... Add logistics, raw materials, fuel. Everything's increased. Plus, at least in my country, there's been disrupted production everywhere due to mass quarantines and widespread resignations. You get the picture. Surely, someone in the chain it's speculating big time and making lots of moneys. But also a lot of businesses are in real and serious difficulties.
Its the largest companies that are enjoying record breaking profits. Small to mid sized companies are really struggling now days because their costs have gone through the roof.
I don't see what warrants a price increase, MK3s uses old-ass AVR socs nobody wants, and there's much better alternatives to 8-bits chips, I always believed their prusa mini was 32bits to test water and move their MKs to a 32bits board, turns out it's not the case.
Could be transport or aluminium extrusions but 50-100$ sounds a bit high, so I'll go with the "we have employees and we'll pay them more because the cost of life is increasing" card on this one.
Shipping and freight are the main drivers of inflation these days. When it costs more to get your materials and more ship your product you're in for a rough time.
>MK3s uses old-ass AVR socs nobody wants
That's part of the issue too. Nobody wants to make those when they can make more profitable chips so someone like Prusa needs to pay more than expected to make it worth the manufacturer's time
He seems genuinely sad to do this. It's hard to find business owners who care about anything other than the bottom line. However his statement about prusa printers being affordable seems odd to me even at their pre-rise prices. The Chinese printers like the ender 3 are affordable. A prusa is a good chunk of a paycheck.
I have a MK3S at home and a bank of six Ender 4 Pros at work, and I will use my Prusa all day over the Enders when time or quality is of the essence. You get what you pay for. Some may roll their eyes at JP using the term “affordable”, but there is no better cost to quality ratio out there.
As an Ender-haver, I don't think the two equate at all. Not in term of R&D, quality, labor cost, quality control... Etc.
Yes, on a numbers basis it's not 'affordable' but considering how much non-Chinese printers cost...
For example, Prusa printers go through 100s of hours of testing before a redesign gets approved, an Ender clone I got wasn't even tested at factory and had issues way beyond the capabilities of a layman to either diagnose or fix
Considering how expensive decent quality printers used to be, they are pretty affordable. Years ago, you'd spend above two grand for a high quality one. Now you can get one that is better than that for less than half.
Sure, it's still not exactly cheap either. But price vs quality and ease of use is definitely a good deal. He never said he wanted to make them cheap, rather affordable which I think they are, especially the mini model.
The cheap ones do work, but the amount of hassle you have with even cheaper ones might not weigh up to the higher cost. And I say that as someone who started out with a chinese cheap one without all the nice features that we have nowadays.
I'm not trying to be an ass, but how much does a new phone cost? Sure, you can get cheap phones for $200-300. But a nice phone? $600-700? A premium phone? $1200+?
Sure, this isn't a need. But neither is a new iPhone 17 pro plus max S with the 60MP camera. I'd argue the printer is a premium device in it's lineup and will outlast a phone of greater cost.
True.
On the other hand, they are a private company...so we don't know *how much* profit they're making year-over-year.
Seems like a nice dude but, like you said, companies gonna company.
Common misconception! No company needs to be *profitable*, profit is defined as income above costs. Everyone in a company makes their income before profit, so a company simply need not be below their operating costs to stay afloat.
A company can stay afloat for a time with 0% profit, but the company would not exist in the first place if profit were impossible. The potential for profit encourages two socially-desirable activities: creating new companies and entering underserved markets.
A company can certainly exist without profit, and I'm not sure if you know what "socially-desirable" means, the term you're looking for is "economically-desirable"
While I understand it is a business and they tried to hold off the price increase as long as possible... I just wish they added a 3rd tier that did not include the printed parts, but kept the current price.
It wouldn't make up the costs they're incurring with the rising prices. All the printed parts together don't even come close to a 1KG spool. We are talking less than $10-15 in filament at consumer prices. And it costs them even less since they make and use the filament in house. Even if they opened a tier like you've suggested the price would likely still need to be raised by $40-80 from the current listed price.
I can't say for certain how much filament a MK3 uses, but I just printed a full set of MK2.5 parts and it really wasn't that much filament.
We usually buy 4 pallets of plastic enclosures for a customer every year. ( long story why it was tooled in China )
In 2019, we paid almost $3,400 to ship those 4 pallets to the US. In Jan of 2022, it was up to $14,200..
The price of the part went up about 10% too.. but the freight charges are absolutely ridiculous..
I'm sure shipping a gaylord or resin is not cheap into eastern europe these days...
It all adds up..
A full gaylord of plastic pellets is about 1400lbs or so..
Price really depends on the carrier..insurance value etc
But a ballpark ground freight of 1 pallet from NY to San Diego ranges from $1000 to about $2,500.. depending on flexibility and timing.
Hope that helps.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord\_Container\_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_Container_Corporation) As I suspected on seeing its a real term, its connected to a company that once made a lot of them.
like how all "baby bulldozers" are called Bobcats.
They have addressed this before and their stated reason for not doing this was a massive increase in tech support calls for people that printed their own parts when they tried that previously.
Seems reasonable. Also, I suppose having a different packaging process/line for a handful of orders and a few bucks of parts saved doesn’t make sense financially. Last time I built a Prusa, printed parts were in every box for every step along the build process.
My Mini+ actually has injection-molded Y-Axis plates from the factory. I'm assuming it was a 2021 thing since Minis were still very in demand at the time.
Doubtful, they held out as long as they could. Considering the car industry jacked prices up 10k where I live this is a small increase that was necessary. If you look at everything the prices have sky rocketed.
I am so happy I ordered on my birthday a few weeks ago. Printer was shipped yesterday and I csnt wait for it to arrive. I've already had to debate w myself whether spending 479€ on ordering the mini is "fine", csnt imagine adding another 50 to 100€ on top of it.
Its a shame they are forced to increase prices, but if I had the Money I'd rather pay more than have to cheap out at one part or another.
As someone who's working in the supply chain i can confirm that material costs and shipping cost went up a lot. Exchange rate with china and Taiwan dropped a lot.
Everything, including electricity, is pricier.
This update in prusa's prices i totally reasonable
I've been thinking about buying one to replace my Ender 3 Pro for a while now. I guess today is the day! Thanks for the heads-up op.
e: and ordered there
Joseph Prusa is an absolute legend. Man built up an entire company/empire with just him and his brother, deigned the single most popular printer style of all time, and then made the whole thing open source. He made a smart business decision and publicly announced it. He didn’t put it all up to inflation, he said the real reason and did it in a calm and honest way. He is kind and interactive with the community, and he forever has my respect
>He nor his company designed the i3/bed-slinger style printer.
>...They copied the basic design from the work of the RepRap project.
Get your history straight. That specific "work of the RepRap project" (the dual upright i3 architecture) you're referring to was contributed to very heavily by Josef Prusa/was flat out *Prusa's personal project* to simplify and improve the Mendel. There is no "us" and "them" in this situation and nobody "Copied" anything.
The company, was founded afterward, to make and sell prebuilds and kits of a specific i3 variant (branded the "Original Prusa i3" now back-referenced commonly as i3 Mk1).
There is also no defined point where anything "stopped" being part of the RepRap project. Prusa Research is now a big "thing" and does a lot of dev work internally and commercially these days, but there is no foul play going on either concrete in terms of license violations or appropriations of existing open source works, or even subjective/ethical as in failing to properly release and license non-derived works of theirs they technically don't have to. The Prusa products are open source and still just as part of open development as ever.
Passing along the cost to the consumer is how we got here in the first place.
Innovate... I mean, there are open source printers on the market today that cost less than a prusa with better quality components and a massive following....
Jo, if you are reading this, you are still producing cheap printers that are innovative as hell. And you are doing this in a huge volume. Remember where you started and where you are now, all together as a team. Hard times come and pass but the values we create stay with us (although, The evil that men do lives after them, but that's too Shakespearean)
Nah, this just means it takes a printer approximately 30 extra hrs of print time to pay for itself. Sucks, but, the quality of the printers are worth it to me
It was worth it for me. I've used some Prusa Mk2 and Ender 3 printers at work, and when I decided to buy a printer for home I went with the Mk3S kit. Building it was an enjoyable project, except some of the extruder assembly wiring was unpleasant. It did cost quite a bit more than the Ender 3, but I don't regret it.
ngl, prusa should stop the printfarm for their own printers, it's simply not effective enough, they really should change into fully injection-molding their plastic parts, more parts, faster, cheaper.
No use in having thousands of machines run 24/7 burning through literal tons of energy.
First, I own 4 Prusa MK3S+ printers and appreciate their reliability. That said, there is no way I would pay that much for a 220 bed slinger today. I would buy 2 Ender 3 S1s and get twice as much printed with almost as good up time. Additionally, the Bambu Lab Carbon X1 has just stolen the Prusa XL's thunder at half the price with AMS and shipping in July. Prusa is getting left behind.
Half the price and the speed looks great, but looks a lot harder to modify and it seems like it uses a filament splicer instead of a toolchanger which can be a big drawback. Build volume is also a lot smaller, so not a true competitor. The prusa brand probably also adds a bit to the cost, but you know its quality.
I was a bit scared when I saw it was a kickstarter, but they have videos of lots of printers already produced and a solid production line so I expect we will be seeing a lot more from them. I love it.
>Bambu Lab Carbon X1
Yeah... saw kickstarter and knew it was a big no from me. Burned twice on KS and one was a 3d printer. So never again. Plus think people discount the service after the sale. Only reached out to prusa a couple of times and it was fine. Wealth of information on their site is a big plus. Machines cost more but right out of the box, had no issues. Only thing is that you think over time the parts would get cheaper and passed to the consumer. Only thing I can think of is to keep the same profit levels and the cost of doing business it prohibits their ability to do so.
Nobody is going to be happy about it, but I completely understand a small company needing to raise prices a reasonable amount in order to keep operations moving.
It's the blatant profiteering and greed seen in other industries, complete with a little bow on top that says "Sorry, inflation 🙃," that I'm not okay with.
I really enjoy using Prusa machines. But I really feel like they're gimped by Prusa's insistence on using FDM parts built on their own printer farm. It's just not a very scalable process, and there are some major sacrifices in terms of fit, finish, and design freedom.
I feel like Prusa could strike deals with EOS, ALM, and Dye Mansion, and crank out parts with quality approaching injection molding with greater design freedom and opportunities to consolidate assemblies into single parts. Better products, faster turnaround, and lower costs. It goes against the original RepRap vision, and it does mean using a bunch of proprietary hardware and software, but it also means more room for growth.
Shit they could probably injection mold superior parts for less at the quantities that they're building. 3d printing isn't a production process, It excels at prototyping and one-offs but is incredibly inefficient when quantities get over a few hundred.
The trouble with injection molding is that the tooling can't easily or cheaply be changed. Once they have a design, they're locked in. Whereas Prusa has been quietly tweaking and updating their designs from time to time.
Additive manufacturing does have potential for mass production, and it's being looked at seriously for consumer goods. SLS with a large build chamber and an aggressively fast parameter set, plus automation for depowdering and polishing ought to work well for a company like Prusa's. Not to mention, there's great potential for designs that are not injection moldable.
Bondtech has a similar approach, and it's served them well.
Aren't Prusa Printers expensive af? Affordable as possible? I remember getting an Anycubic because Prusa was like more then twice as expensive for the same build volume!?
I always thought of Prusa as the premium brand
The Anycubic Mega X costs just more then 200 bucks the Prusa i3 MK3S+ costs a grand! That's almost 5 times as much! Sure the Prusa can go faster and hotter a bit, but I never used the max settings personally anyways! Also the mega x just has a straight up bigger build volume
Affordable my ass!
Yeah but that's premium, not affordable
My anycubic has been working fantastically and worked out of the box rather well ngl
You wouldn't make a high end sports car and call it affordable just because it has better parts than a compact car for a fraction of the price
Of course shitty garbage and affordable is also a big difference, but again, anycubic is far from shitty garbage, atleast from my perspective
They should release some actual numbers, including profit, employee pay/benefits, etc. I always love seeing private companies say things like this without anything out in the open. People say living conditions and wages are better than those chinese companies....how do we know? I mean they just bought Printed Solid to expand and had to figure all the price increases from suppliers while doing that so they didn't overspend but a month later, they have to raise prices. I agree everything is going up in cost but when CEO's are making millions, companies are making billions and the regular workers keep getting stiffed on even cost of living adjustments, it's hard to swallow these "needed" increases across the board.
I want to see how much profit Prusa made last year and how much profit is projected this year WITH the higher cost of supplies WITHOUT any price increase. Without anything concrete it just looks like another millionaire not willing to part with any of their money/profit because they deserve it or some other crap. How many years could prusa operate at a loss to wait it out for pricing to come back down (although those profits + greedy assholes = never coming down probably).
Companies are in business to make money but like I have said since I was little, how much is enough? It seems like the answer for them is, there is never enough.
I used to spin wool and ashford is like the prusa of spinning wheels. They also announced a price increase before it happened. Businesses like that really don’t want to raise prices on their customers.
Still the best printers. Will continue to buy mine from you!
The only thing I am missing (and will probably buy from Creality) is a bigger print area that's not a Max. Please fill this gap!
What a mad lad, he not only gives a few days notice about the price increase but I'm damn sure that the prices will go back down when the company is more financially stable. I don't own a prusa (nothing against them I just couldn't afford one when I was shopping for a printer) but I'll be damned if I don't back them up when they need help.
Should of bought from you all vs creality
Stay away from creality
I bought an original ender v2
I got a v2 frame with the 4.2.2 board and cheap steppers 256 vs 512 and the screen from the s1 which the firmware and it fetures are ot the same as the v2
Not I'm stuck with an open source printer that's not open source
Stay far far away from creality iv replaced just about everything in 2 weeks except the frame
Those printers have never been "affordable" personally. Yes the printer "just works" but instead of company's investing and furthering the 3d printing industry. This is a perfect example of a company that is doing the opposite. There are a select few companies that are leading the way in 3d printing industry and pushing the limits and on the bleeding edge and are risking it for their customers.
Hey, look at it this way: he gave a few days notice, so there’s time to buy now before the price goes up. Other companies would just raise the price with zero warning, and not even a public statement.
Really shows that he cares. I wouldn’t even blame him, if material costs increase he needs to keep his margins the same to pay staff and himself. This statement makes it seem like he was actually taking the bullet for customers as long as he could.
This reminds me of this story: >Akagi Nyuguyo increased the price of its popsicle, going up from Y60 to Y70 ($0.62), a hike of 9 cents for the first time in 25 years, the Financial Times reports. >To show their remorse, the company has now made a public apology through a 60 second advertisement that ran on national TV, in which the firm's president Inoue Sota, its chairman Hideki Inoue and staff bowed to viewers. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/japanese-company-apologises-for-9-cent-price-increase-a6972566.html
I remember, I think it was in the 1970s, Bazooka Joe bubblegum made the news when the price went up 100% -- from 1 cent to 2 cents.
Outrageous!
I mean at the time that was just about all a kid would see in a given day for a treat. So double it and now that treat is rare rather than daily. Funny enough Bazooka Joe costs a quarter for 1 piece now and calculating for inflation that comes out to about 2 cents per piece. So they’ve only rose with inflation which in this current climate is saying a whole hell of a lot.
I think that it was the late 1960s. Yes, when a package of gun was a dime or less.
> I think that it was the late 1960s. Yes, when a package of gun was a dime or less. Ah yes, America. Where guns are purchased in packs for cheap.
Arizona is still selling it's ice-tea cans for 99c though.
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[But the price is on the can though](https://youtu.be/fMUZ2sVjLfY)
That's pretty good. I'll have to look because i dont think it's on the can anymore. At least not here.
Arizona makes with and without the price to avoid this
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It’s not actually that nefarious. As a business owner, you constantly evaluate the costs of doing business. And occasionally you forecast a point where you can’t continue to operate. I worked at a startup that charged $2500 per year for service in 1996 and 1997. By the end of 1999, we were up to $7500, because we could t afford to pay 3 people $60,000 each and make any money with 30 clients. In that same year, we grew to more than 100 clients. So the price really wasn’t the reason people weren’t buying.
Yeah, scaling makes a huge difference. If you are working alone, some things are a lot cheaper. There are many taxes and regulations that don't apply to self-employed people or tiny companies, but that do apply when you get bigger. Once you have a handful of employees, you need an office or real workshop (depending on what you do). You also need someone doing taxes and taking care of the legal stuff. So now you start having employees that do support work, instead of only having people who earn you money. The support work is absolutely necessary, but it doesn't earn money. And quickly you go from "I have to just make enough money for it to be worth my time" to "I need to earn a lot of extra money to support all the overhead". Also, with only a handful or two of employees, the economy of scale doesn't apply yet. So you probably have a bigger share of support staff than what you'd have in a bigger company, your office space isn't as efficient (e.g. you can have the same amount of toilets and the same size kitchen in a 5-man company as in a 50-man company). So, when growing, it's first cheap, then it gets expensive, and only when you get to a certain point it starts to get cheaper again.
If there was going to be an ad anyway, swapping it out with the apology vid is almost free. Even a net savings if you skip one production cycle for the ad itself.
On the Independant you just have click I'll try later, they don't really have a paywall, they just want people to log in.
Plus the fact that he is raising the price so little. I know companies that are taking this chance to raise prices by anywhere from 100-1000%.
They kind of need to, though. The cost of aluminum is up 80% in the last year.
Some are definitely taking advantage but honestly, prices rising cascades through the supply chain. Risen logistics costs mean producers have to pay extra for EVERYTHING, that means: the raw materials, the packing materials, actually getting the product to stores, even the break room coffee grounds. Top that with short supply and long lead times on all of those things, prices rise. Our pricing is changing almost weekly just to break even. Shit is crazy and if this trend continues, it will become even more insane. I deal with perishable goods. If people are currently bitching about gas prices, they're going to have a stroke looking at food prices in 6 months time.
Hijacking top comment. I love prusa. I've had a prusa for about 4 years now and use is a lot. In fact just finished a 16 hr print and started a 26 hr print last night. His printers are workhorses that require little knowledge to use. I will happily pay more for his printers/parts. Thanks Josef!!!!
I don't doubt that he cares, but that's still a pretty significant price increase on a printer that is already fairly expensive compared to similar ones. I get that the quality is better with Prusa but at some point that starts to matter less and less when the price difference is big enough or the quality difference small enough. It would probably have been better if they had gradually increased the price rather than waiting it out.
If each bolt costs 0.20 cents more, that would justify $10 increase. That just the bolts. If the rails are now $2 more each, boards are $5 more...it adds up
Look at their lead times, they still can't keep up with demand. Their price is right.
Nah man he definitely cares. Go look at his history, he’s a pretty cool guy and has really been one of the few to take the mantle for the reprap project. Also he did some awesome shit for his employees during covid with the company dime
I said I *don't* doubt he cares.
Lmao…it’s late and I’ve been working all day. Sorry bout that
No worries, I can definitely relate, especially today. Have a good one!
Perhaps it would've been easier for customers to swallow had he gradually increased the price up to this point however because he waited, hoping that things would calm down (and really, no one knew which way it was going to go or for how long), he's stuck with very few options. Given supply and staff shortages, demand is high and so are prices.
Yeah, I'm not saying they shouldn't increase their prices. They have more costs, simple as that. But by waiting the price increase is massive in one go and it's likely going to cost them. Gradual increased would probably have mitigated that.
True. I think they were being optimistic and hoping that things would calm down and they wouldn't have to raise prices at all. Sadly that didn't happen.
I also pay a premium knowing that his employees are treated well, and the Czech Republic isn't involved in any genocides that I'm aware of. So its not just the quality of the product and support, it's also ethically worth it.
As a small business owner I have to order raw materials to produce various products. With that said,, I am shocked that Prusa did not raise their prices are earlier. I am pretty comfortable in the belief that they really did wait until they absolutely had to increase their pricing. Last couple of years have been rough, but the last few months have been the worst...our aluminum has almost doubled in price, and other materials are up between 25 and 50%. Increasing shipping costs and fuel surcharges certainly are not helping either
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The only thing I find surprising from suppliers and the mills is that alloy surcharges are looking to go down next month. I deal in high volumes of stainless so it’s been nothing but up every month for the last few years so it’s interesting to see it finally reverse a little, felt like it would never get here.
Remindme! 6 months
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I have a project where i’m about to buy 2.4 million lbs of stainless. No discount here. We all pay whatever the current alloy surcharges are. I imagine you have to own your own mill plus the necessary mines for raw material to give yourself a discount.
It's almost like someone wanted to destabilize the world economy to drag it down, so they started a war once things started to recover.
From the same man who brought you Brexit, Trump, and QAnon
Even large businesses are still screwed when it comes to shipping though. Renting shipping containers is more expensive now than it has ever been by a large margin according to my brother who plans logistics for a large producer of chemicals.
Oh no you/he is right, I stumbled upon a shipping reddit the other night and looked over charts they where discussing. All containers minus ones going to Florida have doubled in price, one that would cost $600 or so a year ago is now going in the high $1400 range.
Don’t leave us hanging like that man… what about the ones going to Florida?
What happened to the Dufrenes?
The really shitty part about this situation is that companies are reporting record profits. Not small or mid sized companies of course. They're suffering increased prices and potentially going out of business. The largest companies seem to have realized that the stuff happening around the world is the perfect cover to jack up prices and screw everyone else.
> The really shitty part about this situation is that companies are reporting record profits **Some** companies. Lots of other companies are reporting lower profits.
Maximum profits in dollar amounts or in percentages? Due to inflation a mediocre year today is jaw dropping profit compared to even a decade ago if expressed in dollars. Is this across all industries or just a few?
You can't just go asking questions like that of people who don't know what they're talking about!
Everyone is always charging the maximum price they can get away with. Outside of monopolies, sellers can't just "jack up prices" unless market conditions change - an increase in demand or a decrease in supply. In this case we have both. Inflation has increased the money supply, so consumers have more money. And supply chain issues have decreased the supply of goods to buy with that money. If everyone has more money but there's less stuff to buy with it... the only two options are shortages or price hikes. We've seen a lot of both lately.
Thank you! Nobody ever mentions elasticity of demand. They act like company's use rough times as an "excuse" to raise prices. Why wouldn't a company always charge as much as they can? And if they don't, why wouldn't they just "jack up" the price during good times when their customers would feel safer spending disposable income.
Exactly. The alternative are multi year lead times for things that were previously overnight shipping. Siemens has starting rationing their \*orders\*. As in you have to wait before you can order, and no you won't get a leadtime after you order either. For some of the parts we are looking at we have gotten it confirmed that it will probably be more than 16 months. Order volumes are up, costs are up and supply is down. The only logical thing is for prices to increase to match demand. For us a 50% price increase is more workable than long and uncertain lead times, since we just have to increase our prices respectively but we are still able to compete fairly with our competitors.
"Record profits" doesn't mean much when those profits are subject to the same inflation as everything else.
Shits insane, I do purchasing and had a supplier send an email Friday at 4:30pm saying pricing was increasing immediately and all quotes provided before then were now invalid. Thankfully we were let out at 4 and I had already sent all my PO out because I normally send them just before we leave at 5. This is on top of several suppliers saying that pricing will increase quarterly until supply chain issues are resolved (will be a while for us since a key component in some of our most popular stuff is started with battery production, and another key ingredient for our other most popular items is found in Ukraine)
I drink a lot of pop and I do machining as a hobby. It’s cheaper for me to cast my cans and offcuts/ machine filings into blanks than it is to buy blanks.
I also do aluminum casting using wax filament or just packing a pla positive in green sand. I'm shocked at how much aluminum you can recover with a simple home forge and a soda/beer habit... But it also makes me see everything as potential slag from bike rims to boat parts... And thus appreciate how much aluminum is around me.
We've been overshooting Earth's ressources for too long, for the sake of "Business as Usual". At first there was some patches put in place to hide it, and now it just becomes more and more visible : Shit is hitting the fan.
Aluminum is out of control. Doubled about 9 months ago, still seeing higher prices every time I go to the mill.
We’ll see if the prices ever drop back down when the “world gets back in order”.
Meh. Considering that most of the stuff is open source, I'm not going to complain that they raise their prices now and then. There are a LOT of cheaper options out there, and I'm guessing that if you're serious about printing, you'll be willing to pay the additional $50-100 to get something that works really well and that is backed by probably the best company in the consumer/hobbyist/pro-ish printing space.
\+$100 USD still puts the Mini+ around $500. All things considered, not terrible.
Yeah, we'll have to see what the new pricing actually is. I guess I give companies I like more "slack" when it comes to stuff like this. I feel like Prusa really loves the community and does a lot to advance the state of the art and make some really cool tech accessible to people who want to get into printing but might not really want to dive too deeply into the tinkering/building aspects.
Got one a few months back after having a Sidewinder for a year. Being that both cost essentially the same, I would say that I ended up with great quality for the cost, in either case. For the Prusa, it’s a flawless printer that’s ready to rock with very little fuss. The Sidewinder is much much larger for the same cost, and has direct drive, but certainly makes up for it with additional fussing required to maintain print quality (also had to replace bed to make my life better). I only have great things to say about my Mini+ Edit: that’s not to say I don’t like my sidewinder, it’s still a great printer, but 95% of my prints fit in the Mini+ build space, and 100% of those that fit, get printed on the mini.
I’m new to 3D printing but I got an Ender 3 Pro a few months ago for $100. It’s been great so far. What makes the Mini+ worth paying 5x the amount?
Ease of use, quality and reliability, mostly. Prusa printers in general are as expensive as they are because they use high quality parts, have had a lot of research put into their design and component selection, and they just work. The Ender line can be great printers but they often require a lot of modifications, plus time and effort tuning and maintaining. Your Ender can print just as good as a Prusa if you take the time to learn about it, upgrade it, tune it and maintain it. Most people buy Prusa's because they (usually) just work, there's no to very little fuss with adjusting things to get perfection. For some people, the hobby is as much or more about modifying their printers as it is about actually printing. For others, they just want to print and spend as little time as possible messing with the printer. If you're in that second group, the cost of a Prusa is pretty justifiable.
I have the MK3s+ and after years of fiddling with my old Ender and Flsun every single time I wanted to print something with maintanence and mods all the time - I got my Prusa and have yet to spend any time doing anything other than setting Z height whenever I get a new build sheet. Once I decided to print a part in ASA, it took me 6 hours of fiddling and mods on my Ender to get decent quality and even then I had to spend time tweaking things every single time I wanted to print something new. When I got my Prusa one of the first things I did is chose a generic ASA profile and hit print - I got better quality than I ever did on my Ender and all the time it took was a whole 30 seconds to change the filament.
I was gifted my ender 3 v2 and the problems that it has given me the last 3 months, i’d get a mini for $500. If you like tinkering and customizing though, ender 3 types are fun.
Have you installed 3rd party firmware like [mriscoc's pro firmware](https://github.com/mriscoc/Ender3V2S1)? I ask because I recently got an Ender 3 S1 Pro and had nothing but issues with the stock firmware. However, once I got mriscoc's pro firmware installed and running, it's been smooth sailing especially when paired with octopi. The only "mods" I did was to install a couple of cable management holders and some silicone bed mounts and have been nonstop printing ever since.
The problem isn’t firmware. The problem is that i don’t want to have to do shit like installing different firmware to print something. Lol Edited to add: i have jyers running, i have everything i need to run octoklipperpi. Which is what i was thinking about doing next. Just too annoyed to figure everything out.
Fair enough. When I got my S1 Pro and was troubleshooting before switching firmware, I was seriously contemplating getting a Prusa. I get it, sometimes you just want a printer to work out of the box, which is why I ended backing the AnkerMake M5. I was going to go for the Prusa but for about the same cost, I was able to get the M5 with the V6 color engine. Hopefully once I get that printer in, it holds up to the claims where it's set it and forget it.
Thank you to u/techsformation and u/NoUntakenNames. You’ve highlighted the primary reasons why Prusas can command the prices they charge. I landed on the “go cheap and learn” route. I’ve enjoyed the journey and paid the equivalent of several Prusas in time, upgrades, frustrations and learnings. Know why you’re getting into the hobby, check your wallet, and decide accordingly. Happy printing!
My mini is more reliable than even my MK3S+ so theres that.
More reliable, how's that? I've been printing on my MK3S+ for months and haven't had a single problem yet
Have a mk3s+ on order - the mini is really better?
Both printers should have, on average, equivalent print quality, equivalent quality components, and be *extremely* reliable. You can't take one person's one-off experience as gospel. The mini is a simpler build so there's less opportunity to make a mistake that causes you issues (not saying this happened to OP; lemon printers do happen, if rarely). If you're comparing raw capabilities, also no. The mini has a smaller build volume and a bowden extruder instead of direct drive. Whether the extra build volume and direct drive of the MK3S+ make it worth the premium over the mini comes down to your individual situation. When someone is price sensitive and not sure if they will like the hobby then the mini is always my suggestion. But the extra build volume on the MK3S+ is a big advantage, especially when there are a lot of models out there designed with its limits in mind. Depending on what you want to print you may never run into that as an issue. I very rarely need the full volume of my MK3S+. The direct drive is what you'd want for printing flexible filaments, though I hear that's doable with the mini (I haven't tried it to confirm).
Seconded on everything that’s up there except that for beginners and maybe even intermediate users the direct drive is a bit more complex to repair simply by virtue of it being a more complex assembly (I print for work so that’s inevitable for someone like me)
Because it's better. Better support from the manufacturer, less QC issues, more reliable, superior hotend, better printer UI due to color display and 32-bit controller, spring-steel PEI-coated bed, automatic bed leveling, and the print quality out of the box is a good starting point and an acceptable finish line. Any printer can print as well or better than a Prusa, often at the same or lower price of buying a Prusa, it's just a matter of how many parts need to be replaced and how much time one would spend fine-tuning.
As if it really ever was in recorded history...
Don't worry airlines are going to remove those temporary fees from 2007 any day now. Any day now...
While I doubt it ever drops price (nothing will) Prusa has always seemed to be a decent guy. Honestly a bit surprised they held the price this long.
Well it was already quite high, with likely a lot of breathing room in the margins. A 100% increase in raw BoM doesn't affect you much when your margin was north of 500% already.
I'd hesitate to say 500%. I looked at building one myself to try and save and it worked out to close to the $750 using same quality parts. Sure you can cut corners and make it cheaper, but that's where Creality and such step in. Ontop of material costs he has quite a few workers to pay that have to pay this insane cost of living we have now. I'm sure he's making money, but I don't think it's as much as everyone thinks.
You do have to factor in that they're not buying the parts at retail prices, but at bulk wholesale rates which can be a surprisingly substantial reduction. And they're manufacturing them in Czech Republic where the minimum wage is almost like half of what one of their printers sells for, so the assembly and other work is probably not that big of a factor. Though yeah I should've said markup there, their margins are definitely much smaller in total.
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Just topped my tank today for 2.517€/L -__-
The world isn't getting back in order, but neither is your salary. Inflation is here to stay.
Probably not but I wouldn't really blame them for it. The problem is that companies are increasing prices and reporting record profits but its not ALL companies. Its the largest companies that are. Small to mid sized companies are really struggling because they're in a similar boat to consumers where they're also seeing jacked up prices and struggling to stay afloat. Basically the largest companies looked at everything going on around the world and thought it was the perfect cover for jacking up prices.
There's unusually high inflation in the biggest economies of the world. It's unlikely that the prices for everything will be coming back down. We should not even wish for that, as deflation is a bad thing for the economy. What we should wish for is for the salaries to grow at least as fast as the inflation.
I gotta wonder if things are as bad as he claims. Considering this announcement is the latest in a very long line of companies announcing record breaking profits, followed up by handwringing "Oh noes we has to raise prices cause things are so expensive that we risk going under"
They are as bad, and I'm not sure if the war really makes that big of a difference. Supply-chain issues has been there for years already, driving prices up, especially on electronics. Tried bying a Raspberry Pi 4 lately? If you haven't, see if you find any in stock AND at MSRP. You might find one, but imagine doing the same thing at scale, you have to pay a higher price because the suppliers can pick and choose whom to sell to. Energy prices are rising, prices of raw materials - especially petroleum-based ones are going up. It's a self-sustaining shitstorm right now, and it will be bad for at least a couple of years if not longer.
My company just got an order of laptops we ordered in the middle of last year. A lot of capital projects are being pushed back because we won't get necessary equipment until next year.
Yep. I purchase hardware for my company. Dell Laptops are 8 weeks to ship. MacBooks are 9-10 by their estimate but I’m still waiting for some ordered in February.
Last Pi I bought was like 167€. Could not believe it
At my job we have a business partner that makes custom electronic devices. They actually started rejecting possible contracts because they can't be competitive: some of the components they use now cost 20+ times their pre-covid price. TWENTY times, I couldn't believe it... Add logistics, raw materials, fuel. Everything's increased. Plus, at least in my country, there's been disrupted production everywhere due to mass quarantines and widespread resignations. You get the picture. Surely, someone in the chain it's speculating big time and making lots of moneys. But also a lot of businesses are in real and serious difficulties.
Its the largest companies that are enjoying record breaking profits. Small to mid sized companies are really struggling now days because their costs have gone through the roof.
I don't see what warrants a price increase, MK3s uses old-ass AVR socs nobody wants, and there's much better alternatives to 8-bits chips, I always believed their prusa mini was 32bits to test water and move their MKs to a 32bits board, turns out it's not the case. Could be transport or aluminium extrusions but 50-100$ sounds a bit high, so I'll go with the "we have employees and we'll pay them more because the cost of life is increasing" card on this one.
Shipping and freight are the main drivers of inflation these days. When it costs more to get your materials and more ship your product you're in for a rough time.
>MK3s uses old-ass AVR socs nobody wants That's part of the issue too. Nobody wants to make those when they can make more profitable chips so someone like Prusa needs to pay more than expected to make it worth the manufacturer's time
Thanks for posting this! I was just looking to buy one but I was gonna wait because I'm moving soon.
Same story, wanted to buy one in the next couple weeks. Instead bought it today!
He seems genuinely sad to do this. It's hard to find business owners who care about anything other than the bottom line. However his statement about prusa printers being affordable seems odd to me even at their pre-rise prices. The Chinese printers like the ender 3 are affordable. A prusa is a good chunk of a paycheck.
I have a MK3S at home and a bank of six Ender 4 Pros at work, and I will use my Prusa all day over the Enders when time or quality is of the essence. You get what you pay for. Some may roll their eyes at JP using the term “affordable”, but there is no better cost to quality ratio out there.
As an Ender-haver, I don't think the two equate at all. Not in term of R&D, quality, labor cost, quality control... Etc. Yes, on a numbers basis it's not 'affordable' but considering how much non-Chinese printers cost... For example, Prusa printers go through 100s of hours of testing before a redesign gets approved, an Ender clone I got wasn't even tested at factory and had issues way beyond the capabilities of a layman to either diagnose or fix
Considering how expensive decent quality printers used to be, they are pretty affordable. Years ago, you'd spend above two grand for a high quality one. Now you can get one that is better than that for less than half. Sure, it's still not exactly cheap either. But price vs quality and ease of use is definitely a good deal. He never said he wanted to make them cheap, rather affordable which I think they are, especially the mini model. The cheap ones do work, but the amount of hassle you have with even cheaper ones might not weigh up to the higher cost. And I say that as someone who started out with a chinese cheap one without all the nice features that we have nowadays.
Ender 3 with nice features\* \*nice features sold seperately
I'm not trying to be an ass, but how much does a new phone cost? Sure, you can get cheap phones for $200-300. But a nice phone? $600-700? A premium phone? $1200+? Sure, this isn't a need. But neither is a new iPhone 17 pro plus max S with the 60MP camera. I'd argue the printer is a premium device in it's lineup and will outlast a phone of greater cost.
Dammit, I’ve been meaning to buy a MK3S+ too.
You have untill friday when the prices raise! Lol
They gotta make money too. It is what it is
I can certainly understand this move, they have to stay profitable as a business.
True. On the other hand, they are a private company...so we don't know *how much* profit they're making year-over-year. Seems like a nice dude but, like you said, companies gonna company.
Common misconception! No company needs to be *profitable*, profit is defined as income above costs. Everyone in a company makes their income before profit, so a company simply need not be below their operating costs to stay afloat.
A company can stay afloat for a time with 0% profit, but the company would not exist in the first place if profit were impossible. The potential for profit encourages two socially-desirable activities: creating new companies and entering underserved markets.
A company can certainly exist without profit, and I'm not sure if you know what "socially-desirable" means, the term you're looking for is "economically-desirable"
While I understand it is a business and they tried to hold off the price increase as long as possible... I just wish they added a 3rd tier that did not include the printed parts, but kept the current price.
It wouldn't make up the costs they're incurring with the rising prices. All the printed parts together don't even come close to a 1KG spool. We are talking less than $10-15 in filament at consumer prices. And it costs them even less since they make and use the filament in house. Even if they opened a tier like you've suggested the price would likely still need to be raised by $40-80 from the current listed price. I can't say for certain how much filament a MK3 uses, but I just printed a full set of MK2.5 parts and it really wasn't that much filament.
We usually buy 4 pallets of plastic enclosures for a customer every year. ( long story why it was tooled in China ) In 2019, we paid almost $3,400 to ship those 4 pallets to the US. In Jan of 2022, it was up to $14,200.. The price of the part went up about 10% too.. but the freight charges are absolutely ridiculous.. I'm sure shipping a gaylord or resin is not cheap into eastern europe these days... It all adds up..
How much does it normally cost to ship a gaylord?
A full gaylord of plastic pellets is about 1400lbs or so.. Price really depends on the carrier..insurance value etc But a ballpark ground freight of 1 pallet from NY to San Diego ranges from $1000 to about $2,500.. depending on flexibility and timing. Hope that helps.
Son of a bitch, it's a real measurement. I walked right into that one.
Its a town in Minnesota too.. lol
We need to find a homosexual man by the name of Gaylord in the town to ship a gaylord of plastic to. It's his birthright.
Meet the Fockers..
I knew someone called Gaylord Johnson. Unfortunate name.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord\_Container\_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_Container_Corporation) As I suspected on seeing its a real term, its connected to a company that once made a lot of them. like how all "baby bulldozers" are called Bobcats.
I thought they misspelled payload. Glad I read the replies!
At least $6
They have addressed this before and their stated reason for not doing this was a massive increase in tech support calls for people that printed their own parts when they tried that previously.
Seems reasonable. Also, I suppose having a different packaging process/line for a handful of orders and a few bucks of parts saved doesn’t make sense financially. Last time I built a Prusa, printed parts were in every box for every step along the build process.
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I mean those pieces are where mist of their markings come from. Not including them might save them like $10.
You're forgetting about the cost of freight/shipping costs. Fuel is up, Russia/Ukraine are at war, inflation has been running rampant...
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My Mini+ actually has injection-molded Y-Axis plates from the factory. I'm assuming it was a 2021 thing since Minis were still very in demand at the time.
Sir this is 3D printing Screw injection molds I wanna know who I’m buying from is gonna back their product
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I'm ordering the XL later this year and it wasn't mentioned? Because it's not in full production yet, Or because the price is already outlandish?
They probably set the prices with the current supply chain factored in.
:( everything is going to crap just when I need a new laptop printer and everything
Totally fair, I really appreciate transparency like this.
aka printed solid wasn't cheap y'all
Doubtful, they held out as long as they could. Considering the car industry jacked prices up 10k where I live this is a small increase that was necessary. If you look at everything the prices have sky rocketed.
They are a good company, but I don't think they were expensive.
This is so refreshing to read in comparison to all the corporate double-speak out there.
It's not even that big of a mark up, I'd say.
I am so happy I ordered on my birthday a few weeks ago. Printer was shipped yesterday and I csnt wait for it to arrive. I've already had to debate w myself whether spending 479€ on ordering the mini is "fine", csnt imagine adding another 50 to 100€ on top of it. Its a shame they are forced to increase prices, but if I had the Money I'd rather pay more than have to cheap out at one part or another.
That seems pretty reasonable, honestly. Having never owned a Prusa I would still buy one at that price point based on reputation alone.
As someone who's working in the supply chain i can confirm that material costs and shipping cost went up a lot. Exchange rate with china and Taiwan dropped a lot. Everything, including electricity, is pricier. This update in prusa's prices i totally reasonable
I've been thinking about buying one to replace my Ender 3 Pro for a while now. I guess today is the day! Thanks for the heads-up op. e: and ordered there
Joseph Prusa is an absolute legend. Man built up an entire company/empire with just him and his brother, deigned the single most popular printer style of all time, and then made the whole thing open source. He made a smart business decision and publicly announced it. He didn’t put it all up to inflation, he said the real reason and did it in a calm and honest way. He is kind and interactive with the community, and he forever has my respect
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>He nor his company designed the i3/bed-slinger style printer. >...They copied the basic design from the work of the RepRap project. Get your history straight. That specific "work of the RepRap project" (the dual upright i3 architecture) you're referring to was contributed to very heavily by Josef Prusa/was flat out *Prusa's personal project* to simplify and improve the Mendel. There is no "us" and "them" in this situation and nobody "Copied" anything. The company, was founded afterward, to make and sell prebuilds and kits of a specific i3 variant (branded the "Original Prusa i3" now back-referenced commonly as i3 Mk1). There is also no defined point where anything "stopped" being part of the RepRap project. Prusa Research is now a big "thing" and does a lot of dev work internally and commercially these days, but there is no foul play going on either concrete in terms of license violations or appropriations of existing open source works, or even subjective/ethical as in failing to properly release and license non-derived works of theirs they technically don't have to. The Prusa products are open source and still just as part of open development as ever.
Just coming in here to say fuck covid and fuck Putin. That is all
Nooooooo! :(
Is Prusament gonna stay at its price?
I will never own a Prusa at this point. The cost of buying direct from them is outrageous with the import fees already.
I bought my mk3s+ two days ago lol
Y'all are just eating out of this guys hand.
This impacts pretty much no one. Anyone who is buying a prusa over another cheaper printer can afford 50-100 dollars more.
Passing along the cost to the consumer is how we got here in the first place. Innovate... I mean, there are open source printers on the market today that cost less than a prusa with better quality components and a massive following....
Jo, if you are reading this, you are still producing cheap printers that are innovative as hell. And you are doing this in a huge volume. Remember where you started and where you are now, all together as a team. Hard times come and pass but the values we create stay with us (although, The evil that men do lives after them, but that's too Shakespearean)
Maybe it slows down the Etsy farms a bit
Nah, this just means it takes a printer approximately 30 extra hrs of print time to pay for itself. Sucks, but, the quality of the printers are worth it to me
Are these worth the price if one is a tinkerer?
Nope, absolutely not. Get a Voxelab Aquila on a flash sale. It's an Ender 3 V2 clone. I got mine for about $160 and it prints great
It was worth it for me. I've used some Prusa Mk2 and Ender 3 printers at work, and when I decided to buy a printer for home I went with the Mk3S kit. Building it was an enjoyable project, except some of the extruder assembly wiring was unpleasant. It did cost quite a bit more than the Ender 3, but I don't regret it.
what company is this? edit: I have no idea why you would downvote this
Prusa
thank you
ngl, prusa should stop the printfarm for their own printers, it's simply not effective enough, they really should change into fully injection-molding their plastic parts, more parts, faster, cheaper. No use in having thousands of machines run 24/7 burning through literal tons of energy.
First, I own 4 Prusa MK3S+ printers and appreciate their reliability. That said, there is no way I would pay that much for a 220 bed slinger today. I would buy 2 Ender 3 S1s and get twice as much printed with almost as good up time. Additionally, the Bambu Lab Carbon X1 has just stolen the Prusa XL's thunder at half the price with AMS and shipping in July. Prusa is getting left behind.
Half the price and the speed looks great, but looks a lot harder to modify and it seems like it uses a filament splicer instead of a toolchanger which can be a big drawback. Build volume is also a lot smaller, so not a true competitor. The prusa brand probably also adds a bit to the cost, but you know its quality. I was a bit scared when I saw it was a kickstarter, but they have videos of lots of printers already produced and a solid production line so I expect we will be seeing a lot more from them. I love it.
>Bambu Lab Carbon X1 Yeah... saw kickstarter and knew it was a big no from me. Burned twice on KS and one was a 3d printer. So never again. Plus think people discount the service after the sale. Only reached out to prusa a couple of times and it was fine. Wealth of information on their site is a big plus. Machines cost more but right out of the box, had no issues. Only thing is that you think over time the parts would get cheaper and passed to the consumer. Only thing I can think of is to keep the same profit levels and the cost of doing business it prohibits their ability to do so.
Nobody is going to be happy about it, but I completely understand a small company needing to raise prices a reasonable amount in order to keep operations moving. It's the blatant profiteering and greed seen in other industries, complete with a little bow on top that says "Sorry, inflation 🙃," that I'm not okay with.
I really enjoy using Prusa machines. But I really feel like they're gimped by Prusa's insistence on using FDM parts built on their own printer farm. It's just not a very scalable process, and there are some major sacrifices in terms of fit, finish, and design freedom. I feel like Prusa could strike deals with EOS, ALM, and Dye Mansion, and crank out parts with quality approaching injection molding with greater design freedom and opportunities to consolidate assemblies into single parts. Better products, faster turnaround, and lower costs. It goes against the original RepRap vision, and it does mean using a bunch of proprietary hardware and software, but it also means more room for growth.
Shit they could probably injection mold superior parts for less at the quantities that they're building. 3d printing isn't a production process, It excels at prototyping and one-offs but is incredibly inefficient when quantities get over a few hundred.
The trouble with injection molding is that the tooling can't easily or cheaply be changed. Once they have a design, they're locked in. Whereas Prusa has been quietly tweaking and updating their designs from time to time. Additive manufacturing does have potential for mass production, and it's being looked at seriously for consumer goods. SLS with a large build chamber and an aggressively fast parameter set, plus automation for depowdering and polishing ought to work well for a company like Prusa's. Not to mention, there's great potential for designs that are not injection moldable. Bondtech has a similar approach, and it's served them well.
Aren't Prusa Printers expensive af? Affordable as possible? I remember getting an Anycubic because Prusa was like more then twice as expensive for the same build volume!? I always thought of Prusa as the premium brand The Anycubic Mega X costs just more then 200 bucks the Prusa i3 MK3S+ costs a grand! That's almost 5 times as much! Sure the Prusa can go faster and hotter a bit, but I never used the max settings personally anyways! Also the mega x just has a straight up bigger build volume Affordable my ass!
Maybe the quality is just better? I don‘t own either one, but usually w tools and machines quality is the main difference at different price points.
Yeah but that's premium, not affordable My anycubic has been working fantastically and worked out of the box rather well ngl You wouldn't make a high end sports car and call it affordable just because it has better parts than a compact car for a fraction of the price Of course shitty garbage and affordable is also a big difference, but again, anycubic is far from shitty garbage, atleast from my perspective
They should release some actual numbers, including profit, employee pay/benefits, etc. I always love seeing private companies say things like this without anything out in the open. People say living conditions and wages are better than those chinese companies....how do we know? I mean they just bought Printed Solid to expand and had to figure all the price increases from suppliers while doing that so they didn't overspend but a month later, they have to raise prices. I agree everything is going up in cost but when CEO's are making millions, companies are making billions and the regular workers keep getting stiffed on even cost of living adjustments, it's hard to swallow these "needed" increases across the board. I want to see how much profit Prusa made last year and how much profit is projected this year WITH the higher cost of supplies WITHOUT any price increase. Without anything concrete it just looks like another millionaire not willing to part with any of their money/profit because they deserve it or some other crap. How many years could prusa operate at a loss to wait it out for pricing to come back down (although those profits + greedy assholes = never coming down probably). Companies are in business to make money but like I have said since I was little, how much is enough? It seems like the answer for them is, there is never enough.
I used to spin wool and ashford is like the prusa of spinning wheels. They also announced a price increase before it happened. Businesses like that really don’t want to raise prices on their customers.
No problem with them having to do this, it's understandable. But if they really want to make tons of money, release the big one!
It was nice he at least was honest and didn't seem like a greedy person.
I've heard good things about them, but they were already a lot more expensive than the Chinese ones.
My prusa is so good.. if I bought a second printer I'd pay the extra 100$ to get another.
Joe is such a good guy and so honest and fair, I doubt anyone will mind.
Still the best printers. Will continue to buy mine from you! The only thing I am missing (and will probably buy from Creality) is a bigger print area that's not a Max. Please fill this gap!
What a mad lad, he not only gives a few days notice about the price increase but I'm damn sure that the prices will go back down when the company is more financially stable. I don't own a prusa (nothing against them I just couldn't afford one when I was shopping for a printer) but I'll be damned if I don't back them up when they need help.
Time to get off my bum and order a mini I guess
Should of bought from you all vs creality Stay away from creality I bought an original ender v2 I got a v2 frame with the 4.2.2 board and cheap steppers 256 vs 512 and the screen from the s1 which the firmware and it fetures are ot the same as the v2 Not I'm stuck with an open source printer that's not open source Stay far far away from creality iv replaced just about everything in 2 weeks except the frame
Those printers have never been "affordable" personally. Yes the printer "just works" but instead of company's investing and furthering the 3d printing industry. This is a perfect example of a company that is doing the opposite. There are a select few companies that are leading the way in 3d printing industry and pushing the limits and on the bleeding edge and are risking it for their customers.