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I don't think they would be writing this blog post if their "go ahead: clone us" strategy was working as well you imply it should. Mass market products live and die by the average customer, and the average person in need of a 3D printer will see a Prusa clone for half the price, and buy that instead of the original. Most people can't afford to spend double just on principle, even if they wanted to. And not everyone even cares for such principles in the first place.

I don't claim to know anything about Prusa's financials or technology, but if they are not technologically ahead of the curve as you say – could it be because they're starved for resources to do R&D, because they're losing too many customers to rip-offs?

I don't think it's just ripoffs, or maybe even at all. I am looking to buy my first 3D printer and was looking at Prusa but have decides against it. It is just that Prusa is very expensive when you compare it to Bambu Lab, Anker, and Elegoo with features and price in mind. I don't think any of these are clones.

And none of those come with the support and reliability of Prusa.

I own a Prusa i3 and a Bambu Lab X1C. I'd say the support is very comparable. The reliability has been better on the X1C. And the X1C is a better printer overall.

I'm of course no more privy to their internal knowledge than you are, but it's hard to see how this will help the situation. The segment of the market that can't afford or can't justify Prusa's prices is not going to go upmarket because of a lack of clones. There are already a ton of cheap 3D printers on the market which on paper sound as good or better than Prusa's products. Reviewers are by and large numb to setup and support pain, and tend to discount those factors when talking about budget printers. Consumers go to Prusa because of their reputation. So whether or not there are exact Prusa clones seems pretty irrelevant, because the information a buyer needs to learn to understand Prusa's value will apply whether the clones are there or not.

> I don't think they would be writing this blog post if their "go ahead: > clone us" strategy was working as well you imply

I think a bit more context might be helpful.

When the MK4 was launched I went online to see what people were saying about it. I came across a few youtube videos and blog postings that lambast Prusa, pointing out that they are not cutting edge, accusing Josef Prusa of wanting to dominate the low cost market and then not being able to agree with themselves if Prusa copies too much or too little of what other people have come up with.

I think the blog posting has to be seen as a response to this criticism. Not that their business model isn't working. Because so far, it has worked great. I ordered a new MK4 as soon as it became available, knowing full well that there are cheaper printers and more ambitious printers out there. But I want a Prusa because I know it will _work_. And if it doesn't work, Prusa will stand by their product and help you make it work.

To me that's actually worth paying more for. If at the same time I can support open source, the choice isn't really hard. I'm not a 3D printing enthusiast. I don't care if the filament sensor isn't the most clever solution there is. I only care that it actually works. I need a 3D printer that I can fire up and which will print what I've designed with a minimum of hassle. I don't want to dick around with my 3D printer. I want a reasonably priced product that works, and if it doesn't, a company behind it that will fix things.

When watching the critics two things struck me. The first was that they are 3D printing enthusiasts. They care about the technology and who came up with what idea more than they care about understanding the product. The second was that they do not understand product engineering. Engineering a product isn't about what ticks boxes on paper - it is about produces a good product. Novelty is cool, but novelty that doesn't improve the product is pointless waste.

If you look at a Prusa i3 Mk3 it looks flimsy and mechanically dodgy. Especially when I compare it to my Makergear M2, which is built like a tank. My first reaction when I used a Prusa i3 Mk3 was "this printer works unreasonably well". I hadn't expect it to outperform my M2, which consists of a much better frame, quality linear rails and the stiffest extruder gantry I have seen on any printer.

But the thing is, my Makergear M2 is a bad purchase. The company behind dropped the ball on all the important details. From the build plate, which is an afterthought that doesn't even come with a working mechanism for affixing it to the XY-carriage, the lack of effort that went into the firmware, the poor stepper controllers, to the Z-axis adjustment which is a laughably bad design.

Worse yet, after spending 2-3 times as much money buying an M2, the company kind of abandoned it. Without ever refining it to where it is a proper product. Am I ever going to buy another Makergear product? Of course not. The value for money is atrocious. You have to be a 3d printing enthusiast to fix the product so it works half way decent. They have come up with a few upgrades, but they haven't addressed many of the things you have to deal with every day.

After the first time I tried a Prusa i3 Mk3 we bought several of them at my previous job. The Makerspace I'm a member of has a whole fleet of them. And at every single prototyping company I've been at, there is usually a printer farm consisting of lots of Prusa printers. Not because they can't afford "better" but because it is what the engineers prefer to use. Because they work.

When companies that make tons of money and can afford to buy any 3D printer they want still choose to buy a bunch of Prusa printers, it is worth asking why this is.

You don't always need to be ahead of the curve to serve your customers. You just need to make a better product and provide better support. Or even a product that works properly. Prusa does that. A lot of their competitors, including the clone-makers and more ambitious products very often don't.

Have you tried the Bambu X1-Carbon? I've had mine since the Kickstarter release and consider it both a workhorse and innovative. It's hard to imagine replacing it with something like the MK4.

No, but I'm probably going to buy one later this year.

Prusa printers generally work reliably. And they're expensive - epople are willing to pay for that reliability.

However, Prusa has been selling essentially 2017 technology for too long. Many customers are OK with this because 3D printing got to a decent point in 2017 and they don't need new frills. However, I think the inherent speed limit of the bed slinger design is going to start causing problems for them. Eventually people who just want a workhorse printer will also realize it's nice when the printer takes 60% of the time to produce the same output. Prusa hasn't demonstrated an ability to keep up with where the industry is going.

I'm a Prusa user, I assembled several printers for myself and my friends for a few years now, and I follow many Prusa user groups. Many Prusa users are actively mean against the company, think the printers are overpriced and actively try to get cheap clones. Not all people are like that, but a very large percentage are like this, and don't recognize the value that Prusa put on the table. So, yes, I believe that when doing products like that, that can be fully copied by other vendors, their past business model was really a danger. Anyway it's a shame that they can't continue like in the past.

i think the average customer buys an ender 3 / ender 3 clone. which you can make the case is derivative of a prusa if you go back far enough, but not to the point where the openness status of prusa matters to that argument.

Being a resident of the same neighborhood as Prusa headquarters, having friends who work there and having met Josef Prusa himself, for the first time when he was simply organizing "build your own 3d printer" workshops in a basement in Smichov, here is my take:

Josef Prusa is a fantastic salesman, and he has built his company into a large, formidable, and profitable one, thanks mostly to his core team of competent businesspeople to whom he gives no credit. But you see his name everywhere. In fact the company logo has his name twice. I mean, WTAF? Whose ego is so fragile that he has to put his name in the company logo twice?

The Prusa corporation scams its employees and the taxpayers of the Czech Republic by having everyone on a "double contract" where employees are given a minimum wage full employment and taxed on that, with their extra hours being paid on top. It is totally sleazy and unethical.

Employees have coin-operated coffee machines, The owner drives a disgustingly expensive Audi.

Prusa has been surfing on their brand recognition and slavish brand loyalty for years, and now the chickens have come home to roost. The Bambulab printers are at least 4 years ahead of the competition, everyone knows it, and no one with any sense will buy Prusa printers for more money and far fewer features.

Prusa printers have simply not innovated at all, and their respect for their customers is absolutely zero.

I have absolutely no sympathy for the ego-driven, absolute profit-maximizing Prusa company. Their luck is running out now, and finally we are seeing innovation again. The innovation is coming from everywhere but Prusa.

Thank you for this information. FWIW: This does not seem to be an isolated opinion. I have read (vague) YouTube comments recently, that point in a similar direction.

I'd pay good money to hear Prusa leadership read and discuss this comment

From earlier videos and blogs, the rationale behind this move was a little more clear: by publishing complete gerbers for the electronics, they find themselves competing for parts on the BOM with other companies that are trying to manufacture Prusa's design. By opening the design documents, they create a situation where the parts shortage raises the price for everyone involved.

I do not love nor support this approach, but there is a certain market reality behind the rationale.

I think you got that backwards.

It is also hard to believe that the semiconductor market would be affected significantly by the - in comparison tiny - 3D printing companies.

They directly wrote about the problem, it's not the entire market they are moving, just the market for the specific parts they are attempting to buy. They hired brokers to source some key components and later found out that the two brokers they hired were bidding against each other (due to lack of coordination) and as a result were driving up their own pricing.

Someone coming into a small market and scooping up 10k parts can absolutely move the needle on the pricing, and it already happened to Prusa (if self-inflicted). This isn't a theoretical.

Hmmm. I can easily see Prusa accidentally bidding against their own sourcing and driving up prices like that, but mostly because some of their component choices were unusual compared to the rest of the market. For example, pretty much all of the cheap i3-inspired 3D printers coming out of China switched to 32-bit controller boards years ago, but Prusa stuck with the Atmega 2560 until basically last week. That's kind of a niche part and the entire Atmega range was in short supply globally for a good while during the pandemic. With the way supply chains have been, they could easily have ended up being a huge chunk of the market trying to buy that or similarly unusual parts through brokers at some points.

They made this comment in a video blog regarding the XL, which is using an STM32, several variants of which have been in extremely short supply. I'd presume that might be the specific part they were talking about.

Also, they have been using 32bit controllers for all new FDM printers since the release of the Prusa Mini in 2019. That now includes the XL and the Mk4.

Supply chain competition is something I hadn’t thought about, and it’s an interesting point. I wonder how the clone manufacturers themselves are getting around that.

Well I do wonder what their actual market share is these days since despite all the reliability and support they offer, their machines are still like 300% the cost of an equivalent Creality printer that does the same thing just as well.

It absolutely doesn't do things "just as well".

I bought an Ender 3 quite cheaply (less than €150). I've spent countless hours, fiddling, upgrading, repairing obvious small flaws until it printed really well.

Granted, I leaned a LOT about all things relating 3D printing during this journey. But, there was a lot of frustration, time spent, and even a good amount of money.

I don't regret it the slightest, I learned important skills.

But, we bought a Prusa MK3.5 at my work, and, it just worked, since day one (came pre assembled). No fiddling, no slicer tunning, nothing. We just asked it to print, and done.

So, don't think a 5x cheaper print is equivalent to a Prusa, it's just not.

I've bought the 3 Pro a while back as well, and only did the recommended upgrades at the start (bed springs, metal extruder, filament guide) and it's been printing flawlessly since. I haven't needed to even level the bed at all (though I'll need to replace it soon as it's all worn out by now lol).

But the old Ender 3 is infamous for being hit and miss in setup, the point is that they now have the V2 and other lines which apparently just work out of the box because they're almost fully assembled, much like the old Prusas. Their head start in that area is gone.

very similar to my own experiment on Ender 3 and also to the tons of posts on reddit Actually, the ender experience is more a lego experience when you have to buy tons of add ons, upgrades, days to learn systems & paramters in slicers & firmwares. Also think about the Ender 3 burning PSU trend 4 years ago. times to times, another comment pop on reddit such as "i own 12 ender 3 and sell my production, never did a single upgrade, printing at 50mm and it works like a charm since day one" but it's not majority

I got an Ender 3 Pro, and it just worked. No fiddling.