Quickstart

This page gets you from nothing to a part in your hands. There are two routes into the same pipeline: upload a file you already have, or generate one from a prompt. Both end at the same cart, the same checkout and the same farm.

Route A — print a file you already have#

Use this if you have an STL, a GLB, or a file you have already sliced yourself in Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer.

1. 1
   Open /print

   You can upload and see the price without signing in. When you press Print & Ship or Add to Cart you are asked to sign in or create an account, and your upload and its quote come with you without uploading again.

2. 2
   Drop the file in

   STL and GLB up to 100MB, .3mf up to 40MB. A bare .gcode is not accepted; export the plate as .gcode.3mf. A 3MF can be a sliced plate, a model, or a Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer project, which can print in its own colours. The browser sends the bytes straight to storage and the server reads them back to check the mesh: can we read a printable mesh out of it at all, what does it measure, does it fit the 340 × 320 × 340mm plate. A file that fails here is rejected now rather than three hours into a print. Watertightness is measured and reported on a generated model, but the print upload does not check it: a mesh with holes in it is accepted, so check yours before ordering.

3. 3
   Pick material, colour and quality

   PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA or Flexible TPU, or a Custom filament you name at $0.20/g. Standard is 0.2mm layers; Premium is 0.1mm and costs 1.75x the per-gram rate. Twelve stock colours print at the material rate — anything else is $0.20/g, or $0.25/g in Flexible TPU, which keeps its own rate. You can also set scale, infill and a note for the operator. A sliced file skips all of this: it is printed exactly as you exported it.

4. 4
   Add to cart, or order it on its own

   Add to Cart lets you order several files together. Print & Ship takes that one part straight to Stripe. Either way the price is re-calculated on the server from the stored model, never taken from the browser.

5. 5
   Check out

   Choose where it is going, standard ($7, free over $49.50 in the cart) or express ($15) shipping in the US, and Normal print or Priority print ($5, or 10% of the items when that is more). International is $30 flat and free over $500. Stripe then collects the card and the shipping address.

Route B — generate the model first#

Use this if you do not have a file. A new account starts with 5 generation credits; a fast draft costs 1.

1. 1
   Open /design and describe the part

   Type what you want, up to 500 characters. You can also start from a photo, or from two to four photos of the same object taken from different angles. Fast Draft is the default and the cheapest; Hi-Fi costs more credits and takes longer.

2. 2
   Wait for the model and its review

   Generation is asynchronous — the page polls until the model is ready. When it lands you get the mesh plus a printability review: whether it is watertight, its dimensions, an estimated wall thickness, its worst overhang, and whether we repaired it automatically.

3. 3
   Read the verdict before you order

   The review is geometry, not engineering. It reports print-ready, needs supports, auto-repaired, or needs redesign. Estimated wall thickness is derived from the model's smallest overall dimension, not measured wall by wall, so treat it as a flag rather than a specification.

4. 4
   Order it, or take the file

   Add to Cart sends it to the same checkout as an uploaded file, and the cart re-quotes it server-side. If you would rather print it yourself, download it as STL, OBJ or 3MF — the export is scaled so the largest dimension is 100mm.

What happens after you pay#

Payment is what creates the order and gives it its number, such as 2610019. Stripe confirms it, a confirmation email goes to you, and a work order goes to the operator with the file and every setting needed to print it.

1. Your order appears at /orders with the status placed.
2. The operator queues it onto a specific printer and a specific AMS tray, checking that the spool loaded is the material and colour you paid for.
3. It prints. When it finishes, the machine cools to a temperature where the part will release from the plate before anyone touches it.
4. A person checks the part, packs it, buys a label and hands the parcel to the carrier.
5. The tracking number is recorded against your order and emailed to you as a link.

Following the order#

An order moves through six stages, plus cancelled. Every stage after placed emails you by default. Most are set by hand by the operator, as bookkeeping about a physical object; printed is also set by itself once the order's last plate finishes on the farm's queue, and delivered by a nightly job when the carrier confirms delivery. An order you collect from us ends Ready for pickup, then Picked up.

How long it takes#

Two choices at checkout set it. Normal print is included and ships in 4–5 business days; Priority print ($5, or 10% of the items when that is more, once per order) goes first in the queue and ships in 1–2. Then the carrier: 4–6 business days on standard in the US, 2–3 on express. Transit is the carrier's typical window, not a guaranteed delivery date.

A large batch depends on how much of the farm it needs, so for that the lead-time panel on /farm computes a live figure: how many printers can take work today — the fleet minus anything offline, under maintenance or held by a customer reservation — the median grams-per-hour measured from the last 200 completed jobs, and how much work is already queued ahead of you. One day is added for packing and handover. It quotes 1, 10, 100 and 1000 orders separately, and you can set your own part weight to re-quote it.

Two things it does not model: weekends and holidays are counted as ordinary calendar days, and a print that fails and has to be run again is not in the estimate.