RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
Are there people/admin on this forum that have links with Prusa and could ask?
It might be company proprietary information however. marketing decisions and market strategy might be kept close the their chest.
REPAIR, RENEW, REUSE, RECYCLE, REBUILD, REDUCE, RECOVER, REPURPOSE, RESTORE
RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
The easy way to do it would be to make the difference in price of a kit vs assembled much smaller. More or less forcing the hand of the buyer. That way only people who actually enjoy building the kits would choose to go that route.
The main factor for me when deciding was price.
Of course they could just stop offering the kits altogether (as they seem to be doing with the C1L,
I honestly don't blame them , the support burden must be huge.
RE:
Yep, or make the kits stupidly expensive. Reminds me of a Chris Rock sketch where if you want effective gun control, just make the bullets $5000 each.
But, I like the idea of making the kit the same price as the fully assembled model. The justification would be insurance by Prusa against the support costs.
In my case, my decision was absolutely not related to price but to the experience of knowing my printer. Otherwise, would have kept the MK4S as is and bought a BL.
RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
I hope they don't abandon kits. I put my mk3s together myself and just upgraded it to mk4 this winter. Thinking heavily of buying a Core one kit next winter. I grew up with erector sets and putting things together is a fun time for me.
I've never placed a support call
RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
I hope they don't abandon kits. I put my mk3s together myself and just upgraded it to mk4 this winter. Thinking heavily of buying a Core one kit next winter. I grew up with erector sets and putting things together is a fun time for me.
I've never placed a support call
The CoreOne construction is much more complex that a Cartesian bed slinger. Future printers will be even more beyond the capability of the casual kit builder to construct. I'm not speaking from certainty, however my intuition tells me that the Core One+ is Prusa's last kit printer.
RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
I agree. Not so much about saving money, but the ability to understand how it goes together.
It helps a lot when you do have problems. I have built a number of Ender 5 units - thankfully they are gone. 3 Rat Rigs and the Prusa XL with 5 heads.
Some of us enjoy the build and the learning experience that goes with it. I have my eye on the Big core with the nozzle swapper, but want to see more real world feedback. I also have found that I don't want to be the beta tester any more.
RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
I also have found that I don't want to be the beta tester any more.
absolutely but that's a fine line to walk. And I believe that's understood by many folks who are clamoring for kits that make absolutely no sense for them proven by a trivial Excel spread sheet counting build time hours. Me among them.
RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
That is incomplete data, though. Those who've bought the kits and have assembled them correctly would not post in the forum at all. If you see 20 people posting about having trouble assembling their printers, but there's 200 or 2000 people who have completed it without issues, that's a 10% - 1% range. You won't have accurate data unless Prusa reveals the number of kits sold
The statement that there is more support required for people who put their kits together themselves is an assumption - there is no data to support this as of yet. One could argue the more technically proficient kit builder is more likely to solve their own problems, or at least spend the time to research or use the forums to get a solution before resorting to the support line. I myself would rather work with other users to find the root cause of a problem than have support use the "shotgun" approach until something works.
But it's also possible support costs are higher for kits. How will we ever know...?
The data we do have is that on this forum, a large number of questions comes from kit builders, and these questions often take much longer to resolve than the typical non-kit-related questions. At least that is the case on the Core One sub-forum where I am mostly participating.
Of course it's possible that kit builders are more likely to come here instead of turning to support. (That's also an assumption.) But in any case, I reckon that the more lengthy troubleshooting dialogs for kits problems apply to Prusa support as much as they do here. There is simply a much broader spectrum of things that might have gone wrong...
RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
I have enjoyed the challenge of building the kits, but my background helps. I attended electronics schools while in the USAF, starting on devices that used vacuum tubes, built a Heathkit c0lor TV, probably over 100 computers and destroyed a few cars. There is a real thrill when you finish the build and getting it working.
Prusa really helps in they usually include a reasonable group of extra parts, I have the ability to make some common ones disappear. I do not want to be an early adopter, the instructions improve as more builds are done, and technical and software is better, support is more familiar with problem areas and spare parts are stocked
RE: It wouldn't surprise me if Prusa abandons kits
https://blog.prusa3d.com/prusa-i3_3543/ published in February 2025, stating "Today, Prusa Research is a company of over 800 people, and we ship over 10,000 Original Prusa printers to 165 countries directly from Prague every month"
Some rough napkin math - let say those all are kits, and 10% of sold units are having a bad time, that would still make over 1000 of new failed builds monthly. That would mean new 33 user issues daily, that would be abysmally exhausting and would literally mean you have a 10% of products treated as sold with a failure, some of which would end as returns and thus generating additional burden for processing such requests in other company teams. Add to it issues of the existing owners of the printers that pop out or you still need to solve old issues.
Taking into account the fact that they produce new printers and the volume of the printners increases and the fact that people started complain that the support quality declined I assume they had to limit available products so that the number of issues is lowered. Removing kit would be the most impactful, because you assume that non-qualified worker is no longer assembling your product.
See my GitHub and printables.com for some 3d stuff that you may like.