What Is the Cost of Developing a Custom 3D Printing App for Prusa Printers?
Hi Prusa community,
I’m exploring the idea of developing a custom mobile app that connects with Prusa 3D printers for remote monitoring and print management. Has anyone here worked on something similar? What kind of development and integration costs should I expect?
Appreciate any insights or experiences!
I am James Wood a Content Writer.
RE:
Not sure if you want to reinvent the wheel, but maybe you have some ideas that the existing methods don't have...
We already have Prusa's offerings (PrusaLink for LAN and PrusaConnect for WAN). There are also OctoPrint based solutions (I use OctoApp to monitor my OctoPi setup, but LAN only). An OctoPrint plugin that doesn't exist yet (that I know of) that you might want to look into is some sort of PrusaConnect plugin for OctoPi. Here are a couple APIs that I have found (though I'm not sure how to actually use them...) https://connect-mobile-api.prusa3d.com/api/docs https://connect.prusa3d.com/docs/cameras/#tag/cameras
See my (limited) designs on:
Printables - https://www.printables.com/@Sembazuru
Thingiverse - https://www.thingiverse.com/Sembazuru/designs
RE: What Is the Cost of Developing a Custom 3D Printing App for Prusa Printers?
Hi Prusa community,What kind of development and integration costs should I expect?
There are too many variables to give an accurate number, but likely in the tens of thousands of dollars. The cheapest route would be to fork an existing project and pay one of the developers/contributors to modify it for your needs. There is no way to know how many development hours it would take and what kind of salary they would require. Let's guess $35 per hour and a imagine 10 hours per week for six weeks just to get a working prototype. But again, a lot of this depends on the skill of the developer and the scope of the project (you might need more than one developer). Once you have a prototype then there is a ton of testing and bug fixing which would be an ongoing expense. There is a saying in the programming world that you spend 10% of your time getting 90% of the project done then 90% of your time chasing the last %10. Pretend it takes $5000 to get an app in the Google Play store that gets 3-star reviews because it doesn't work very well. How much would it cost to make it a 5-star app?
I don't have experience making mobile apps. I've been a web developer for decades, and the one time I tried to build something simple in Android Studio is was so difficult I gave up. Anyone who is good at mobile development probably won't come cheap.