Upload and print

The /print page takes your own file, validates it, weighs it with a real slice, and turns it into an order we print in Austin, Texas and ship to you. You choose material, colour, quality, quantity, scale and infill; the price comes from the grams the slicer says will leave the nozzle. You need an account, because the file is stored against it and the order is billed to it.

What you can upload#

A mesh must fit the plate: 340 × 320 × 340 mm on a Bambu Lab H2S. The three dimensions are sorted before they are compared, so a part that only fits when rotated still passes. An already-sliced file skips this check entirely — your slicer already arranged it on a plate, and the footprint it reports can include purge lines and prime towers that are not part of the model.

How the upload works#

The bytes go from your browser straight to storage, not through the app. There is a 32 MiB cap on request bodies in front of the service, and anything over it is rejected before the app ever sees it — so a 100MB model could never arrive as an ordinary POST. It used to fail as a confusing validation error rather than a size error. Now the app hands the browser a signed URL, the browser uploads to storage, and the app validates the stored object afterwards.

1. 1
   The page asks for an upload URL

   It sends the filename and the size. Format and size are checked here, before a single byte moves — an unsupported extension or an oversize file is refused now rather than after the transfer.

   jsonCopy

   { "fileName": "bracket.stl", "size": 48213004 }

2. 2
   Your browser uploads to storage

   A signed PUT URL comes back, valid for 15 minutes, pointing at a staging path. The transfer is browser to storage, so its speed is your connection, not ours.

3. 3
   We validate what actually landed

   The app measures the stored object itself rather than trusting the size the browser claimed, parses the bytes that actually landed, and only then copies the exact bytes it validated out of staging into their final path. That copy is the point of the staging step: the signed URL stays writable for its full 15 minutes, so validating and printing from the same writable object would let a small part be priced and a large one printed.

4. 4
   The model is weighed

   As soon as the file is stored, a slice is queued in the background. Until it lands the page shows Calculating, because showing an estimate and then quietly replacing it reads as the site changing its mind about the price.

What the quote is computed from#

Weight. One all-in rate per gram covers filament and normal machine time together, so a 21 g PLA part costs exactly 21 × $0.12 = $2.52 and nothing else is added except postage.

• Billable weight rounds up to the whole gram, like postage — so the figure agrees with the whole grams Bambu Studio shows you.
• There is a $1.00 minimum per part.
• A colour outside the twelve stock spools is priced at $0.20/g, whatever the material, because the spool has to be bought in for your order and most of it will go unused.
• Ordering several copies of one part discounts it: 5% off at 5 or more, 10% off at 10 or more.
• Shipping is $7 flat in the US. Checking out through the cart makes it free over $50, and prices international postage at $30 flat, free over $500; Print & Ship always adds the $7.

The grams come from a real OrcaSlicer slice wherever one is possible, not from a volume estimate. The estimate reads a part as 30% solid walls plus infill, which undercounts anything thin badly — a stencil that weighed 21 g on the plate estimated at 12.9 g. That is why checkout refuses to sell an unmeasured print: it would sell below the advertised rate. An already-sliced upload is priced from the filament figure in its own header rather than from that estimate — but checkout still wants a slice of ours on file before it will sell any print, and a bare .gcode is the one thing we cannot re-slice, so send a plain .gcode plate through the print order API (/docs/api/submit-order) rather than this page.

curl -s https://x3dstudios.com/api/price \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"bboxMm":{"x":120,"y":80,"z":60},"material":"pla","quality":"standard","quantity":1,"color":"Black"}'

{
  "filamentChanges": 0,
  "multiColorGrams": 0,
  "multiColorHours": 0,
  "grams": 320,
  "printHours": 15.84,
  "materialCost": 38.4,
  "machineCost": 0,
  "shipping": 7,
  "baseFee": 0,
  "perUnit": 38.4,
  "subtotal": 38.4,
  "total": 45.4,
  "currency": "USD",
  "material": "pla",
  "quality": "standard",
  "quantity": 1,
  "color": "Black",
  "customColor": false,
  "pricePerGram": 0.12
}

The options you choose#

Placing the order#

Print & Ship goes straight to Stripe checkout for that one file. Add to Cart holds it so you can order several files together, and the cart re-prices every print server-side before checkout — the number stored in your browser is never trusted. Either way you get a confirmation email, the order appears on /orders, and it moves through placed, printed, packed, shipped, delivered.

Troubleshooting#