Everyone should own a 3D printer in 2025

Everyone should own a 3D printer in 2025.

Well, not literally everyone. Most people who get into the hobby are makers or tinkerers.

But after purchasing one I’m convinced it’s one of the easiest ways for anyone to be sustainable and economical today with regards to purchasing habits.

The 🐘 in the room: Upfront costs

There’s no use in touting the benefits of 3DP without calling out the upfront costs. The first is your printer itself:

• The Bambu A1 mini can be had for $219 at Micro Center. Considered the best “starter” printer, it has a ton of ML features like vibration compensation, board leveling, and more.

Next is tools. You’ll want a couple spools of PLA, which is the material used for most prototype prints, to get started:

• PLA Filament — $19/roll (2x)
• Misc. parts — replacement nozzles, e.g. (~$15) (1x)

So you’re looking at about a grand total of $255 (plus sales tax if you’re not somewhere like DE or OR). Not too shabby at all, given a decade ago a $600 printer with “simple” in the name was considered affordable.

Unlike a lot of items, with printers price has actually gone down while quality has gone up.

Countless use cases

• Metal screws can be substituted with PLA in many cases 🪛
• Niche car parts that require weeks of overseas delivery or never show up
• Camera gear
• Household organizers
• Many more things

You control the supply chain (sorta)

Regardless of whether you had it in your bingo cards that we’d be playing peek-a-boo with tariffs, the reality is settling in.

But inflation has been happening for years, well before recent tariffs. Ikea, one of the largest furniture brands in the US, significantly raised prices as much 70% since 2019.

• SKÅDIS in 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20191008164149/https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/skadis-pegboard-white-50320805/)
• SKÅDIS in 2024 (https://web.archive.org/web/20240213232642/https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/skadis-pegboard-white-50320805/)

While cumulative inflation was significant during and after the pandemic, the numbers still aren’t numbering. I’m pretty sure there’s still a large difference between 26% and 70%….🧐

While China still remains dominant for printers (the Bambu is made there), some consumable filament is actually produced in the USA at competitive prices to China-produced filament.

Since you print your own parts, you’re not at the whim of unexpected price increases from the market or even vendors pulling stock for not being successful to sell.

Case in point

A couple of years ago, I installed an Arlo video doorbell. Removing the old one exposed a huge gap in the masonry, which I had to fill, for aesthetics and functionality (water and electronics don’t mix well).

I grabbed this plate from Amazon for $13.99. It was the only option available and it shipped domestically, so it arrived in a few days. What’s the problem then? Seems like you can just order stuff you need to avoid the hassle of printing?

Let’s fast forward to today: that same item is out of stock. I’d be SOL if I was doing that same install today — because no other vendors online sell this part. (And good riddance- I learned Arlo doorbells suck, Google Home FTW).

Amazon sellers do this all the time, we just don’t see behind the scenes. When something isn’t selling anymore (i.e. it’s taking up valuable space in a US warehouse) it gets delisted and liquidated, either by going to a landfill or somewhere like Woot.

So I went online and tried to find a compatible 3MF (Bambu) or STL (generic) model file someone had created. I got unlucky a second time, no hits.

Knowing generative AI is becoming increasingly better at object understanding from images and code generation, I started a chat with GPT-5, passing in one of the reference images with measurements from the product listing.

Surprisingly, it generated a snippet of OpenSCAD code that actually rendered into a real object!

From here, with a couple clicks I added support and sliced it in Bambu Studio. And that was it!

Total time from image to printable? 4 minutes. Was the final design perfect? No, but it was crazy close for spending just minutes on it with no prompting. It probably would have worked for this use case, too (dimensions looked good).

Moral of the story? You can manufacture your own household items today with next to zero knowledge of CAD and modeling. With image-to-code models and upfront costs, this skill is democratized from a special subset of skilled individuals to your everyday hobbyist.

Unpopular opinion: I’m sensing some parallels to off-grid principles here 🌲

Your most expensive asset

Lines. Queues. Waiting. Traffic. It’s tough for most people to enjoy these things. (If you actually like traffic, you’re either a monk or a sadist. Zero in between). 🚗🚙🛻🚐🚗

One of the common arguments against owning a printer is that there’s a huge investment in monitoring jobs, fixing failed jobs, etc. And the toil isn’t worth it.

Maybe this used to be true, but with modern printers, with a solid file it’s just set-and-forget. You can even trigger prints from your phone.

Contrast this to buying something online (I’ll save the horror of physical shopping):

• searching for and finding a good vendor to buy from
• waiting for the package to arrive (can take weeks or months if coming from China)
• checking your doorbell for arriving packages
• timing the delivery, in case your area experiences package theft

And for quality control (when that thing you got doesn’t fit or you realized it’s made of junk):

• returns (usually physical if Amazon)
• seller/site support if a “no questions asked” return isn’t available

So sure, if all goes well (your item is in stock), you get it in 2 days or less.

But when things don’t go wrong, you’re investing much more time in typical online shopping versus being able to print a ready model in a couple hours or less.

Some returns processes can feel downright hellish, trying to claw your money back from a vendor. In some cases it’s easier to take the L. What if you could just skip all that altogether?

Sustainability

Obviously, the way to be most sustainable is to limit consumption altogether. But we live in the modern world, and thus consumption is a fact of life. Instead of throwing our hands up in the air, though, we can still make conscious decisions to reduce, not eliminate our carbon footprint.

Speaking of, what else has gone up since 2019? Emissions. According to an independent study of Amazon’s logistics business (the Amazon most people know, not AWS):

• shipping emissions are up 75% since 2019 (to 5.8 million tons)
• aviation emissions are up 67%, largely driving the above. ✈️

Using a projection of 6.3 billion U.S. delivery orders from Capital One Shopping, that puts us at about 0.84 kg of CO2 per package. Considering most items are smaller, a reference print of a 20g trinket would be about 0.11 kg. While not perfect, that’s 13% of the impact, accounting for material and electricity of running the print job.

Sorry not sorry, Bezos. You might have a bunch of slick Rivians cruising around, but you’re not fooling anyone.

Being able to print replacement parts on demand significantly reduces the concept of planned obsolescence, giving used objects value without needing to trash them or pay up for costly repair. This could be a knob on your washer or a part in your dishwasher.

The point I want to drive home is that we need to think about how we consume, how much we consume, and why we consume. There are alternatives, it just requires changing our thought patterns. So many of the actions we take is driven by repetitive learned behavior, like it or not.

I believe most of us can break that cycle. (obligatory book rec)

Conclusion

So…by now I’ve probably sold you on a 3D printer. They produce actually useful household items significantly cheaper . Not to mention you’ve seen just how much time, toil, and environmental impact it can reduce. I believe we’ve reached that point of it transitioning from a niche hobby into the mainstream market.

I don’t wish to sugarcoat it. PLA plastic obviously can’t be used for everything. It’s recommended to ventilate your printer as they produce VOCs (volatile organic compounds), which can be respiratory irritants. You’re still consuming plastic. It’s probably not a good idea to use even special material around food.

But even with all this said, the drawbacks are a drop in the bucket compared to the unparalleled benefits. What are you waiting for? Future you might just thank past you.

If you liked this piece or want to see more of something mentioned, drop a comment or send me an email: fitzgeraldcedric@gmail.com

#NoAI (AI was only used for research. All content is original of the author)