Remember when desktop 3D printing felt like the Wild West? A decade ago, anyone with a printer, some filament, and a free weekend could grab models from Thingiverse, tweak a few slicer settings, and let the machine run overnight. The process—and the prints that resulted from it—were chaotic, messy, and often frustrating, but it was also…fun? It felt like the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine, and it was, arguably, glorious.
That free-for-all experimentation era is fading fast, though. In its place? Carefully curated, tightly controlled “walled gardens” where companies make not only the hardware but also the software, the consumables, and the very marketplace where files are shared. It’s the iOS ecosystem, but for 3D printers. And the kicker? While there are protests from the edges, for the most part, it actually works, and people are growing to love it.
Keep Them Coming Back for More
When I was a young engineer starting out, I worked for an automated machinery company that serviced the sewing goods industry. Sewing machines have hundreds of moving parts, and they wear out over time. My employer took me aside once and showed me one of those parts in a spare bin. He rolled it in his hand like a poker chip. The tone in his voice grew somber as he said to me, “See this plate? This costs us $15 to import. We sell it for $400. It wears out, on average, every 4 to 6 months. Always remember: Whenever possible, sell the stapler and the staples.”
He explained to me that for the business to continue running—and to grow and keep everyone employed—the initial purchase of the machinery couldn’t be a customer’s only purchase. Parts and supplies like these, with incredibly high markups, were what kept the lights on. A customer who bought a machine from us could spend upward of five to 10 times more than the cost of the machine itself over its lifespan.
Fast-forward to now. I’m no longer hawking sewing machine parts. Instead, I’m writing this story in my home office, where I tinker with and test all sorts of gadgets, including 3D printers. The office is filled with not just printers, but also filament, resin, and spare parts: “staples,” from floor to ceiling. Plenty of other hobbyists’ and entrepreneurs’ home offices look just like mine, which makes you quickly realize the oodles of cash that are up for grabs selling 3D printing accessories.
(Credit: Michael Lydick)
So it’s only natural that the walled gardens of 3D printing are growing taller, as the big players have emerged and dug in. Depending on where you stand, that’s either a long-overdue correction or the beginning of a slow suffocation. A feature, or a fetter.
What Walled Gardens Look Like in 3D Printing
The 3D printing walled garden is the hardware, firmware, cloud slicer, material profiles, model repositories, and support resources, among other elements. If you want to print, you’re encouraged—and sometimes forced—to use only what the company that made your printer sells. This is happening in two universes at the moment: The consumer side, which is what we mostly cover at PCMag, and the professional side, where many American and European companies have found respite from Chinese competitors for the time being.
Compare that to the “open” 3D printing world that I, along with many other pioneering hobbyists, grew up in, and which still exists but is fading rapidly. In that world, you can download models from a dozen free sites, slice them in Cura or PrusaSlicer, and run whatever filament happens to be on sale this week. Need a new gasket for a DIY repair, perhaps? Don’t order it from Amazon or even McMaster-Carr. Just print your own on an open-source printer. It’s cheaper, but it’s also messier and more time-consuming.
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This phenomenon isn’t novel, of course. Printer—paper printer—manufacturers have been pulling this trick for decades by making proprietary ink cartridges. A decade ago, HP tried to block the use of third-party ink via firmware, making you fear bricking your own printer if you tried to use another vendor’s ink. (HP later abandoned this effort, at least in part.) Apple’s App Store lives on the same principle. I can’t share songs I purchase on my Android phone with my wife, who is browsing the iTunes store next to me as I write this.
The difference, though, is that in 3D printing, the stakes involve not just money but reliability, safety, and speed—things that can make or break a newbie’s first impression.
Why Companies Are Raising the Walls
If you’re wondering why companies are doubling down on lock-ins and gathering as many customers as they can into their respective gardens, the answer is simple: control.
Support Costs Drop When You Control Every Variable
Think about it from the company’s perspective: Fewer random filaments means fewer angry customers sending failed print photos to your support team—the “Why is this piece of junk not working?” tickets. It also means fewer nozzles you have to ship out, at your cost, to keep their flaming fingers out of the forums and Facebook groups long enough to get them past the jam they caused with bargain-basement filament.
(Credit: Michael Lydick)
Safety Improves When Resins and Filaments Are Vetted
Fewer toxic fumes mean fewer mechanical misfires. Formlabs, maker of the Form 4 I recently reviewed, claims to have eliminated the dangerous VOCs found in many resins and uses ISO certification in its resins and other ancillary products to maintain consistency. The Form 4 is therefore a favorite of pros who know exactly why things like tensile strength, tensile modulus, elongation, and heat deflection are critical.
Performance Is More Consistent
Tuned profiles mean smoother prints and fewer headaches. When I was coming up in the hobby, it was assumed that you were always tweaking and adjusting; printing calibration cubes, Benchies, and temperature towers. If you didn’t know how to do those things, you were a newbie to be pitied, and most of your prints probably failed.
Those days are long gone. I recently tested the Bambu Lab H2S, which not only comes with pre-tuned slicer settings for every Bambu Lab filament but also includes equivalent settings for nearly every major filament supplier. I tested both, with flawless results and no tuning or futzing required.
Recurring Revenue From Accessories Keeps the Lights On
Printers are often sold at razor-thin margins; filament and resin make up the difference. Here’s some napkin math: Assuming we’re talking about a larger brand, the gross margin on filament sales is somewhere between 40% and 70%. The net margin on 3D printers, on the other hand (after all costs and overhead), is maybe 20% or 25%. When you buy a $1,500 printer, the company makes $300 in profits. Assuming you use 50 spools of filament a year per printer, that’s another $500 per year for the life of the machine. Keeping you in the garden is good for business.
(Credit: Bambu Lab)
Data Loops Build Better Machines
Telemetry on what succeeds and fails feeds back into better slicers, better defaults, and tighter ecosystems. Web-connected slicers like Bambu Studio bring files offsite to a cloud server and back again, which has me concerned about possible IP theft, but let’s face it: If Bambu Lab knows all about the file you were printing in a machine that can measure (via cameras and sensors) how the print went, it can learn from failed prints. Tesla monitors all the data from cars using its Full Self-Driving feature to improve the AI that makes driving decisions, and 3D printer companies can take a similar approach. Instead of telemetry data and speeds, it’s g-code and video. No one I’ve ever met who owns a Tesla is mad that their driving data goes back to the corporation, because they know it’s improving their experience. Data loops within the walled garden perform the same function.
If you were raised like me, printing your 3D bits from USB keys instead of via a web app, this can be a hard leap to make. But let’s not forget that life outside the garden isn’t free from data-sharing pitfalls, either. In 2021, a Thingiverse data breach potentially exposed data from hundreds of thousands of users.
The Upside for Users
Let’s be honest: most people don’t want to fiddle with firmware, PID tuning, or slicer voodoo. They want the print to work the first time. Walled gardens are delivering that in spades. People are loyal to their brands as a result, with the term “fanboy” tossed around more frequently than ever. If you are a Prusa, Bambu Lab, or Creality convert, you know that the energy in those forums is akin to football fans arguing over which team is going to win the Super Bowl this year. And fandom has its concrete benefits.
First-Print Success Rates Skyrocket
A beginner can unbox, click Print, and hold a finished part hours later. I’ve met people who’ve never had a first-layer issue, while back in the day, I would spend hours fighting with my Creality Ender 3, invoking all sorts of remedies, including hairspray, glue sticks, and prayers to whatever deity was listening, to get to the second layer.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Time Savings Are Real
No more spending 3 hours browsing a forum thread to fix a stringing issue: The maker world moves faster than it ever has. I met three vendors at a maker festival in September who cumulatively had about 500 articulated figurines for sale: $5 for three. These people earn their living from these fairs and don’t have time to spare fixing things.
Quality Is Better
Tuned profiles and real-time monitoring reduce the likelihood of failure. I recently had a client come to me asking to reverse-engineer the transparent dome light on his cooking range. The manufacturer didn’t make replacement parts, and so I scanned it and printed it with the Form 4 using Formlabs’ Transparent V3 resin, which I know to be dimensionally accurate. The part measured 2.95 inches wide (75.05mm, to be exact), and it was a perfect fit.
I happily pay more for the resin, knowing I can take on those types of jobs and produce an engineered replacement that measures up to what I designed in my CAD software. There’s no Wild West aspect, so the experience isn’t a nail-biter, but I get great prints with pre-tuned dimensional accuracy.
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(Credit: Michael Lydick)
Safety
Certified materials and built-in interlocks aren’t just marketing; they prevent accidents. When I load the 10-watt laser module into the Bambu Lab H2S and go to cut a part from 3mm-thick birchboard, there’s a QR code sticker in the corner that tells the cutter exactly what material I’m using. It knows what power levels to use and how fast to move the laser through the wood—all the things it needs to avoid setting the board on fire and burning my house down. I trust that over my late-night intuition just before I go to bed, with best guesses driving my g-code. I’ll pay more for that, as will most people, especially when I first start working with new materials I’m unfamiliar with.
The Downsides
Of course, just like an actual wall, the walled-garden approach has multiple sides, and there are plenty of negative ones.
Costs Creep Upward
Proprietary filaments and resins cost more, and some companies use DRM chips to prevent you from using third-party resin. It can get even more extreme than that: The Form 4 and other Formlabs printers prevent owners from using whatever resin they want in their machines unless they pay hefty unlocking fees.
(Credit: Michael Lydick)
Innovation Slows
When companies dictate what’s allowed, experimental materials and techniques get buried. Once a company can build a large enough user base, it controls the pace of development, as opposed to the early days when innovation leaps were required to punch through into the market.
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It takes a “black swan” innovator to force everyone with a walled garden to catch up quickly. I believe we’re seeing this now with Snapmaker’s U1 multi-toolhead printer, which has raised more than $20.6 million on Kickstarter at this writing. Bambu Lab is now attempting to compete with its upcoming Vortek tool-changing accessory.
Marketplaces Gatekeep
File visibility isn’t always merit-based; it’s algorithmic. That means the best designs don’t always win—the best thumbnails do. When you control the keys to the kingdom, you control what files people are potentially printing on your machines.
Data Is Extracted
Every print you slice in the cloud reveals information about you, your projects, and your habits to the vendor. Privacy issues are a real concern in a world increasingly reliant on 3D printers for manufacturing, and studies have shown that IP theft is a significant risk in 3D printing. The larger the garden and the more dependent users are on it compounds the possibility of theft or hacking. There’s a tremendous element of trust involved.
Longevity Questions Loom
What happens if the company shuts down its servers or moves on from your model of printer? Suddenly, your “ecosystem” is a paperweight. This has plenty of precedent, too: Google recently discontinued the smart features of older Nest thermostats.
The only company currently providing a robust path forward for upgrades is Prusa, which is arguably being left behind in terms of features as a result. While you can turn a Prusa MK3 or MK4 into a Core One, the Core One simply doesn’t compare to an H2D or H2S, Bambu Lab’s latest models.
A Buyer’s Guide to Walled Gardens in 3D Printing
Which Printers Are ‘Open’ and Which Are ‘Closed’?
Prusa printers are arguably the most un-walled mainstream printers out there. The company’s Printables is free and open-source, though it lacks the same monetized incentive structure of Bambu Lab’s MakerWorld.
(Credit: Prusa)
Formlabs is mostly closed. Its resin and software ecosystem is locked tight, but its users largely accept it because the quality is unmatched, with dimensionally tuned and accurate outputs. Want your parts to fit together properly? You need Formlabs resin.
Stratasys has always been closed. For enterprise buyers, that’s the point: certifications, compliance, security, and contracts matter more than tinkering. Like Formlabs, Stratasys—and subsidiaries like Ultimaker—have largely retreated to the educational and professional space, with a dwindling number of consumer models available.
Elegoo, Anycubic, Qidi, and Creality occupy a fuzzier space. They’ve largely been open, but are moving toward curated slicers and marketplaces. Everyone sees where the market is headed, and no one wants to be left behind. Each of these companies has its own filament and resin lines, with virtually every possible color and polymer available, and “pre-tuned” slicer settings in Cura or Orca to get you started quickly without fiddling.
So, should you buy into one of these gardens? It depends on what you want.
If you prioritize reliability, enter the garden. You’ll spend more, but you’ll save time and frustration. If someone were to ask me what a good first 3D printer to buy is, and I wanted them to have the easiest setup and most enjoyable experience, I would drop them off from a theoretical helicopter directly into the middle of Bambu Lab’s garden.
If you love tinkering, stay outside. Cheap filament, third-party slicers, wild mods—the Wild West is disappearing, but it’s not gone. If I were on a spaceship that needed to survive a 100-year mission, I would bring a Prusa with me, along with 10,000 rolls of Prusament. Blessed are the tinkerers, and they all wear black-and-orange shirts.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
If you have the space and budget for two printers, buy one of each. Use the polished ecosystem for mission-critical prints, and reserve the tinkerer’s machine for experiments with unconventional filaments and techniques. My LulzBot TAZ 5 has been printing for 10 years now. I can put any filament I want into it (I create a makeshift heated chamber by throwing an emergency blanket over it) and keep the earliest phases of my IP private in my office. Just keep your eyes open for red flags: consumables with DRM, printers that function only via cloud slicing, or companies with a history of abandoning products.
What Will the Walled Garden of the Future Bring?
I’d bet on more walls, not fewer. Expect:
Creator subscriptions and “pro” packs. This seems inevitable to me. Platforms like MakerWorld will become more like Spotify, and designers will rise as a result.
Smarter, telemetry-driven auto-profiles. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, it’s hard to envision a world where it isn’t embedded in a machine’s ROM to monitor prints via sensors and cameras.
Partially walled gardens, in which vendors still allow escape hatches but prefer you don’t use them. Bambu Lab and Formlabs provide exit hatches for third-party filaments and resins, and I suppose see the necessity of a door in and out of the garden.
Lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny. If it’s illegal for HP to stop people from loading third-party ink cartridges, as some customers have (so far unsuccessfully) argued in court, it’s inevitable that regulation will catch up to what is arguably an analogous situation with 3D printers.
(Credit: Michael Lydick)
The genie’s out of the bottle. 3D printing is going mainstream, and mainstream means “make it easy.” Easy usually comes with walls. The walled gardens of 3D printing aren’t inherently evil. In many cases, they make the tech more reliable, safer, and far more approachable for the average hobbyist. Without them, adoption would stall.
But make no mistake: Every convenience comes at a cost. If you step into a garden, know the price of admission, and know that the gate may not always stay open. The best gardens don’t just protect the company—they protect the users and the creators, too.
If vendors get that balance right, maybe a wall doesn’t have to feel like a prison. Maybe it can feel like an amusement park—curated, safe, and pleasant, but just exciting enough to be worth wandering into.
About Our Expert
Experience
I’m a mechanical engineer with more than 30 years of experience in industrial automation and design, with projects ranging from individual inventors to international corporations. I hold credit on six patents and have never stopped looking at the world through the glasses of “What if we did this?”
I’ve been 3D printing for more than 15 years, designing in Autodesk Inventor and Fusion 360, and working across both SLA and FDM printers. My fabrication background spans machining, CNC programming, welding, and brazing. I’m also an Amateur Extra Class ham radio operator (AA2QO), with a focus on portable low-power HF communications.
I’m a curious Gen Xer, inspired early on by Jim Henson’s groundbreaking Creature Shop. His work showed me how imagination, engineering, and design could bring new worlds to life—a lesson I’ve carried through my career and personal passions.
I live in the foothills of North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains with my wife of 30 years. From home base, I explore in my technology-laden 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser, and when I’m not on the road, I develop predictive financial software for retail traders and investors.
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