I did not plan to write this. I am a hobbyist, not a critic, and I have genuinely enjoyed using my Bambu printers over the past years. However, a steady accumulation of decisions has reached a point where I feel compelled to speak up.
The growing closure of the Bambu ecosystem has been discussed extensively in the community. Heavy reliance on cloud infrastructure, mandatory server communication for many functions, and a LAN-only mode that feels more like an afterthought and a reaction to community pressure than a genuine solution. These issues are well known. What concerns me increasingly is that they are no longer merely theoretical problems.
Both in the USA and in Europe, there are active regulatory efforts underway to restrict what users are allowed to print, often framed around preventing the printing of weapons. In a closed, cloud-dependent system like Bambu’s, such restrictions could be implemented quickly and quietly via firmware updates or server-side changes, even retroactively on already sold machines. On a truly open system, this would be far more difficult. Bambu’s current architecture makes enforcement uncomfortably easy.
What has finally pushed me over the edge, however, is the increasing artificial gatekeeping of features combined with an unbalanced relationship with the open-source community.
The P2S was released with 2 mm belts even though Bambu was already planning the superior 1.5 mm belts for higher-end models. The result is noticeably worse VFA and ringing, a compromise that was entirely unnecessary from a technical standpoint. This feels less like an engineering decision and more like deliberate product segmentation at the customer’s expense.
The X2D is particularly frustrating in this regard. Marketed as an engineering-grade printer with active chamber heating and a 120 °C bed, it is nevertheless software-capped at 300 °C nozzle temperature. Bambu has provided no official technical or safety-related explanation for this limitation, even though the hardware configuration suggests it is capable of more. It is hard not to see this as an artificial restriction designed to protect the positioning of more expensive models.
Additionally, Bambu frequently integrates features and code from open-source projects into its own software, sometimes introducing noticeable bugs, such as incorrect color space handling in the new color mixing function. Credits to the original creators are often only added after significant community pressure. At the same time, Bambu contributes almost none of its own innovations back to the open-source community.
I understand that product segmentation is common practice in business. What bothers me is the overall direction: artificial limitations, one-sided exploitation of open source, and customers increasingly treated as a revenue base rather than a community deserving of respect and transparency.
3D printing attracted many of us precisely because it represented openness, repairability, user empowerment, and true ownership. Bambu initially impressed the community with innovation and speed, but in recent years the focus seems to have shifted toward maximising short-term profit at the expense of long-term customer value and trust.
I have therefore decided that I will not purchase any further Bambu products until I see a clear change in direction toward greater openness and genuine customer respect. I hope enough other users will make the same choice with their wallets. In the end, that is the only language companies reliably understand.
I would genuinely welcome being proven wrong and would much rather return to being an enthusiastic Bambu supporter.
Sincerely,
Kurt K.
They could fix this so fast, that’s what bothers me the most. Their machines are great, they just need to fix the software and business side.
I personally do not mind the tight ecosystem much. But it annoys me that they are closing down an ecosystem that is based on open source infrastructure.
LAN only mode is not great. It works fine, but significantly limits the user experience. They could have easily made it so it is just sending print logs to the server instead of the entirety of gcode. If they cared enough, they could put a small software team on it and get the necessary changes made in probably a week or so.
I cant blame Bambu or any other printer manufactures for the regulatory efforts. In a way, the way Bambu runs their cloud servers actually makes this better because some of the laws are written in a way that printers without those regulatory features will be made illegal. But yes it lowers the resistance to these laws because there is already a server connection.
The belts were most likely an engineering change that happened after the P2S was starting to be shipped. Since it was one of the biggest complaints with the P2S, they needed to come up with a solution for the next model they released.
I suspect that the 300c nozzle limitation is a result of not having a sufficient amount of nozzle cooling with the fans that the X2D uses. And that limitation probably stemmed from needing to keep the toolhead compact.
I would also complain about the lack of support for people in the western hemisphere. It sucks to have to wait overnight to get a response since they always come in around 3am EST.
Not only the waiting over night, but are we dealing with AI for support ? It seems the first 2 or 3 responses are canned and not even relevant to the situation.
I suspect that there is less AI being used than people think. But due to how they have their system set up, it is someone (who probably doesn’t speak the best english) selecting pre written responses. (From what I understand, that is how a lot of customer assistance jobs are nowadays, it is all about the script)
If it was AI, then you would get a response immediately.
Creality and Bambu are going the same way, Prusa isn’t fully open, and you obviously can’t get the new tool changers coming, for the same reason. You could lose most of the new smart software and AI tuning and build a voron, or use an old Ender, or a Sovol Voron clone, and then keep having to keep tuning the thing whenever you change filament, but some people are OK with that.
Also you better be posting from Linux. If I see Windows or Mac I am going to laugh at you.
I think you are probably right, AI would also probably respond closer to the problem. But what ever it is you have the joy of knowing there is going to be 2 or 3 of these canned responses and each of them will be 24 hrs apart so you may as well settle in for week long ordeal.
I feel like a lot of these complaints come back to something I have pointed out before: the product lines are the differentiator, and people keep missing that.
The P series has always been the lower/mid product line. Complaining that it lacks every higher-end feature is basically complaining that Bambu still has product segmentation. A 2 mm belt on a P series machine may be a fair thing to discuss from a durability or performance standpoint, but it is not automatically evidence that Bambu is cheating anyone. It is a lower-cost platform, and those tradeoffs are part of why the P series exists below the X and H series.
Same with nozzle temperature. The X series never supported 350°C nozzles either. That was not taken away from X-series owners. The higher-temp 350°C capability is part of the H series machines. The P and X series being limited to around 300°C is consistent with how those product lines have been positioned.
I feel the same way about the negativity around the Bowden setup on the X2D. People seem to treat it like it is supposed to be a true dual-nozzle machine, but that is not really how I see it. The X2D feels more like an engineering-focused machine with a dedicated support nozzle, while the H2D is the true dual-nozzle platform. That difference is another example of product separation, not automatically a design failure.
There are plenty of fair complaints people can make about support, cloud dependency, LAN mode, or how Bambu communicates changes. I agree that those are real discussions. But saying a P series machine should have H series hardware, or acting like 350°C was expected on the X series, does not seem like fair criticism of the product. Separating features makes sense from a product perspective. Every manufacturer does that.
If you really view Bambu Lab as you described, not only you shoudn’t buy any more BL printers, but you should also sell the BL printer(s) that you have and be done with it for good.
I respect and admire people for taking a stand for what they believe in. But the issue is that by keeping BL printer(s), the rhetoric can seem empty. Similar rhetoric have been proven to be empty before.
During the 1980’s the Republicans changed the laws to be more favorable to the very wealthy. Because of that a few individuals have become wealthy beyond imagination at the expense of everyone else. These oligarchs decided that they would make more money if they closed the factories in the US and have the Chinese, who had lax labor and pollution laws, make everything at a cheaper price. The oligarchs bought up one company after another, reducing most of them to little more than a brand name slapped on a generic product coming out of a Chinese factory. You can hate on the Chinese all you want, but it has been American billionaires, the so-called Epstein class, that has been ruining the United States for their selfish ends. It was they who gave American technology to the Chinese. As such, innovation has all but died in the United States. Everything has become AI and the circus that swirls around the deranged orange goblin.
I have decided to use Orca Slicer as Bamboo software doesn’t allow me to change vibration settings without editing G-code. I am not very happy to do this, as I am worried I might mess something up.
I bought a Bambu printer in December of 2023. At that time Bambu was a closed system. It was a major selling point, the sharing of prints on MakerWorld. Their entire system is built around it. People have been making money from people printing their designs that they have put into the system. It is a system the requires server communication so that creators can be accurately compensated and feedback from users can be seen. It is a community system. You seem to misunderstand what it is all about. It doesn’t work if everyone is sitting in the corner doing their own thing.
MakerWorld already bans weapons. The world is better off without fools running around with deadly weapons.
If the open source community was all that, how is it that it never produced anything more than clones for tinkerers? I have been using Autodesk products since the late 1980’s. The open source CAD programs are vastly inferior and always have been. It seems rather unreasonable that you would expect Bambu Lab to just give away their technology.
MakerWorld already bans weapons. The world is better off without fools running around with deadly weapons.
100%
With the caveat that some of the tech Bambu uses, started with, and or retains, is open source. Have the developers of that open source tech been openly given credit for their work? I’ve often found that companies that declare their tech proprietary are in fact using competitor tech without permission. I’m specifically looking at Microsoft’s early Windows products, and this was proven in court (This particular topic has been hashed out in another thread and I’ll not bring it over here).
Example:
Bambu Studio (Slicer): Based on the open-source slicers Slic3r, PrusaSlicer, and SuperSlicer, incorporating open-source contributions.
Everybody, please tell me when the topic follows the important part instead of going to “he who we will not name because… orange things, pricey oil, inflation, etc.”
