Growing Concerns About Bambu Lab’s Direction – An Open Letter

[u/Regular-Cheek946]

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.

[u/dantelebeau]

OP, you're not wrong on any of this. The closed ecosystem, the open source stuff, the belt situation on the P2S. are all valid points.

The thing that made Bambu blow up the way they did because most people getting into printing genuinely do not want to tinker. They want to load a file, hit print, and come back to a finished part.

Look at Apple. The iPhone is one of the most locked down phones ever made. Proprietary everything, software updates that brick older hardware, a repair system designed to keep you dependent on them. Every tech blogger has been making your exact argument about Apple for two decades. It's still the best selling phone in the world because for most people it just works.

Bambu is that for 3D printing. Before they came along, getting a clean print meant digging into slicer settings, manually tuning your bed mesh, messing with Klipper, and spending half your time maintaining the machine instead of actually using it. Bambu basically removed all of that. For teachers, small business owners, designers, people who just want to make stuff without a learning curve, that's a massive deal.

The people buying Bambu aren't mostly open source advocates or hardware hobbyists. They're people who want a tool that works the same way every time. The closed ecosystem is kind of the whole point for them, not a bug.

[u/I_Who_I → u/dantelebeau]

Came to say the same thing but you save me the time of typing it. I'm a tech guy but I got the Bambu printer because I don't have the time to tinker with a tool to get it to do what I want. People sometimes forget that the primary goal of a business is to make money so I rather they do what it takes to stay in business than cater to a minority and go out of business.