When do you need print farm software?
Updated 31 October 2026
Print farm software pays off once it saves more labour than it costs, and on fees alone that happens almost at once: at CHF 42 an hour, saving one minute per printer per working day is worth CHF 14.70 per printer per month. The real threshold is setup time and whether the software can drive your printers at all, which puts our line at about three printers.
That line is our opinion. The rest is arithmetic you can redo with your own numbers.
The method
We use the labour rate from cost per plate, which is CHF 42 an hour or CHF 0.70 a minute. Its solidity is covered on that page. We add one assumption, 21 working days a month.
Value per month = printers x minutes saved per printer per day x 21 x CHF 0.70
What our 45-minute morning was worth
Starting prints on our seven printers took about 45 minutes every morning, or about 6.4 minutes per printer.
| Minutes a day | CHF a day | CHF a month | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All seven printers | 45 | 31.50 | 661.50 |
| The five we can drive over the network | 32 | 22.40 | 470.40 |
The second line is the ceiling. Software can't start the Kobra 2 Max or the Kobra X for us, because they can't be driven over the network with anything we have working. Nor would software remove all 32 minutes, because someone still has to clear each plate and check it. We have no timed figure to publish for what software saves, so this page works with a range.
What software costs
Read on 31 October 2026. Vendors change these.
| Option | Price | Limits to check |
|---|---|---|
| Bambu Studio multi-device | Free | Cannot manage printers in LAN-only mode |
| Bambu Farm Manager | Free, paid features planned | Bambu printers only, Windows PC running the server, Bambu account to activate |
| FDM Monster | Free, AGPL-3.0 | You host it. OctoPrint, Moonraker, PrusaLink and Bambu LAN mode |
| Printago | Non-commercial free. Commercial: first slot free, then $4 per slot a month | Slots are jobs running at once, not printers. The free plan has no SKUs, orders or API |
| SimplyPrint Free | $0 for 2 printers | 1 user, 15 cloud slices a month |
| SimplyPrint Basic | $5.99 a month for 3 printers | No extra printers |
| SimplyPrint Pro | $9.99 a month for 5 printers | Extra printers from a base rate of $4 each |
| SimplyPrint Print Farm | $39.99 a month for 10 printers | 1 user included |
Bambu's post says the current version "is and will remain free to use", and also that it plans paid features with no decision on scope or price.
Break-even on the fee
This asks how much time a plan must save to pay its own fee. We count $1 as CHF 1, which is on the safe side: the dollar was about CHF 0.81 in August 2026.
| Plan, fleet | Fee a month | Seconds saved per printer per day to break even |
|---|---|---|
| SimplyPrint Basic, 3 printers | 5.99 | 8 |
| SimplyPrint Pro, 5 printers | 9.99 | 8 |
| Printago, 5 printers with 5 slots | 16.00 | 13 |
| Printago, 10 printers with 10 slots | 36.00 | 15 |
| SimplyPrint Print Farm, 10 printers | 39.99 | 16 |
Starting a printer took us 6.4 minutes, or 384 seconds. So the fee is not the deciding number on any of these plans.
Break-even on setup
Setup is the real cost, and free software has it too. We assume 8 hours to install, connect printers, set up profiles and learn the tool, which is CHF 336. That assumption is ours and untested, so use your own.
| Printers | Starting time a day at 6.4 min | Payback if it saves 3.2 min per printer | Payback if it saves 1 min per printer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6.4 min | 7.1 months | 22.9 months |
| 2 | 12.8 min | 3.6 months | 11.4 months |
| 3 | 19.2 min | 2.4 months | 7.6 months |
| 5 | 32 min | 1.4 months | 4.6 months |
| 7 | 44.8 min | 1.0 month | 3.3 months |
| 10 | 64 min | 0.7 months | 2.3 months |
The 3.2 minutes is half of our measured start time, and the 1 minute is a cautious floor. Neither is a measurement of any product. This table also assumes one start per printer per day, and the 6.4 minutes comes from our own mixed fleet and may not scale in a straight line. Short plates mean more starts, which favours software.
At three printers, payback falls under a year on both columns, and starting takes about 20 minutes a day. That is where we would start looking. For hands-on time per plate, cost per plate shows what it moves: from 12 to 5 minutes takes our example from CHF 14.76 to CHF 9.60.
When no software is the right answer
- One or two printers with a working vendor app. You can save about 13 minutes a day at most. Spend the setup day on your files.
- Printers it can't drive. Check each model first. Two of our seven would get nothing from any of this.
- Every job is different. If each plate needs a human decision about the file, a queue saves little of that time.
- The printers stand idle. Software does not make orders. A printer that starts twice a week doesn't have a 6.4-minute morning.
- You have not timed anything. Time a week of mornings first. It costs nothing and it replaces every assumption on this page.
Which free option fits which fleet
All Bambu, with a Windows PC that can stay on. Try Farm Manager first. It wants LAN mode off and the printer unbound from Handy, while third-party tools need LAN-only and Developer Mode on. So decide before you configure the whole fleet.
Mixed brands, and someone comfortable running a server. FDM Monster covers the most printer types of the free options here. It has one-line Linux, Docker and Raspberry Pi installs. Free means no fee, not no time, so count that time at CHF 42 an hour too. This page has no first-hand test of it, and we found no independent comparison.
Orders, SKUs or an API. This is where free plans usually stop, as with Printago's free plan above.
What this page does not prove
We found no independent study of how much labour any farm software saves. What we found is vendor material, such as a farm story on Printago's own site, which cost per plate uses as a rough check.
We also build Rackrew. It is free for 2 printers with no card, then CHF 14 a month for 5 printers, or CHF 11 a month paid yearly. By the same sum, the monthly price breaks even at about 11 seconds per printer per day. It is our product, so check that sum yourself.