u/MoosePunch_

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Every time I tried to bring up FixMyPrint in a 3D printing subreddit it got removed. Sometimes with a warning. Sometimes just gone, no explanation. The main subs have strict self-promotion rules and they apply them broadly enough that a solo founder trying to get genuine feedback on something they built has basically nowhere to go.

I get why those rules exist. Nobody wants their community turned into an ad board. But there's a difference between someone spamming affiliate links and someone who built a tool and wants to know if it actually helps people. That difference does not get a lot of grace on large subreddits.

So I stopped trying to fit into spaces that weren't built for what I was doing and built one that was.

r/3DPrintingTools launched about four months ago. The idea was simple: a community where founders, makers, developers, and hobbyists could openly share tools, apps, browser extensions, and anything else built to improve the 3D printing experience. Whether you built it yourself or just found something useful online, you could post it without worrying about getting deleted.

It grew faster than I expected. The community is sitting at 2,300 members now with around 2,500 daily visits. About 100 different tools and apps have been posted. On a typical day three to five new ones show up. Some are big projects, some are small scripts someone wrote to solve their own problem and decided to share. All of it is welcome.

What surprised me most is how many people were in the same position I was in. Lone developers, hobbyists who built something useful, small teams who made a tool and had no good place to share it. The frustration was common. The lack of a place to land was common. The community filled a gap that I did not realize was this large until people started showing up to fill it.

If you build things for 3D printing or you find tools that make the hobby better, r/3DPrintingTools is the place for it. No deletion, no warnings, no gatekeeping. Just people sharing what works.

As the title says,

V3 is live, FixMyPrint got a full rebuild, I've been busy with it for the last month or so.

Here's what shipped:

The big changes:

The app now treats your machine as the center of gravity, not just a field you fill in. When you start a session, it knows your printer, your filament, your slicer, and what you've printed before. The dashboard reflects that instead of showing you a blank slate every time.

What's new:

Consultation onboarding. The first session walks you through your setup once, then the app remembers it.

Preflight linter. Before generating any settings, 8 hardware compatibility checks run automatically. Hard stops for genuine conflicts (CF filament on brass nozzle, ABS without enclosure, temp ceiling violations). Always free, never paywalled.

Maintenance Ledger. Log prints, track outcomes, record what you changed. Builds your machine's history over time.

Advisory cards. Fact-based flags on your dashboard when a real risk condition exists. No scores, no percentages, no guesses. Just: here's what we know, here's what to check.

24h outcome emails. after a print session, one email asking how it went. One click to respond. Failures route back into the fix flow with your context already loaded.

Photo Diagnosis à la carte. $0.99/use for free tier users instead of a hard Pro wall

Shareable fix links. Share a public page showing community-ranked fixes for any printer/filament/issue combo

Demo route try the preflight linter at fixmyprint3d.com/demo with no account required

The fix database:

58,000+ confirmed fixes, just ran a normalization pass that recovered ~3,800 previously unranked rows. Rankings are cleaner than they've ever been.

Free tier stays free:

3 settings generations and 3 diagnoses per day. No card, no countdown, no lifetime wall. Come back tomorrow if you hit the limit.

Android is live. iOS is coming.

fixmyprint3d.com

As always feedback always welcome here or by DM or email.

Hey r/3DPrintingTools,

Been quiet on here for a bit, heads down shipping. FixMyPrint V2 is live and I want to talk about the feature I'm most proud of that nobody's really noticed yet.

The 3D printing linter.

If you're a developer you already know what a linter does. It runs before your code executes and catches problems: wrong types, missing variables, things that will definitely break at runtime. ESLint, Prettier, that little red squiggly line in your IDE. Catches the issue before it becomes a wasted hour.

I built the same thing for 3D printing.

Before FixMyPrint generates any settings, it runs a preflight check on your hardware and material combination. It's looking for conflicts that will cause a failed print before you've even loaded the filament.

Right now it catches:

Enclosure gate: filament requires an enclosure, your printer is open frame. Flags it, explains why, lets you proceed if you want to risk it

Temperature ceiling: your printer's max nozzle temp can't reach what the filament actually needs. Hard stop with explanation

Moisture advisory: hygroscopic filament with no drying signal. Surfaces the risk before you print

Health advisory: ABS/ASA/PC on an open printer with no ventilation. VOC warning

Nozzle hardness: carbon fiber or abrasive filament, brass nozzle. Flags the hardware mismatch

Every one of these is a category of failed print that has nothing to do with slicer settings. You could have perfect settings and still fail because your hardware and material are fundamentally incompatible. The linter catches that first.

It's backed by the same community data layer, 58,000+ fixes extracted from Reddit posts, ranked by whether the original poster confirmed it worked. The preflight rules came from seeing the same failure patterns appear over and over in that data.

V2 also shipped:

Slicer Export: native profile files (.cfg / .ini / .json / .fff) ready to import directly into your slicer. No copy-pasting values.

128 printer profiles with full specs

16 long-form troubleshooting guides, no signup required

Expanded to 9 slicers and 13 filaments

Free to try, 5 settings generations and 5 fix diagnoses on the trial, no card required.

fixmyprint3d.com

As always, brutal feedback welcome. That's why I'm here.

Brent

Following up on my earlier posts with a different angle. Instead of which problems come up most, here's which ones the community is actually best at solving, ranked by confirmed fix rate.

First, what counts as a confirmed fix. A "confirmed fix" means OP came back to their post and said something actually worked. That's it. No confirmation from OP means it doesn't count, even if 10 people gave great advice.

1. First layer not sticking - 23.3% fix rate (1,951 posts)

2. Weak overhangs - 20.9% fix rate (694 posts)

3. Poor bridging - 20.5% fix rate (322 posts)

4. Layer separation - 20.0% fix rate (871 posts)

5. Blobs and zits - 19.7% fix rate (1,320 posts)

6. Clogging and heat creep - 19.6% fix rate (764 posts)

7. Stringing and oozing - 19.3% fix rate (1,406 posts)

8. Under extrusion - 19.0% fix rate (1,281 posts)

9. Rough top surface - 18.6% fix rate (1,917 posts)

10. Layer shift - 18.4% fix rate (1,138 posts)

11. Seam scars - 17.8% fix rate (584 posts)

12. Support scarring - 17.8% fix rate (365 posts)

13. Warping and lifting - 17.2% fix rate (744 posts)

14. Ringing and ghosting - 16.3% fix rate (923 posts)

Here's the thing about these numbers. They look low. The best fix rate is 23.3% and the worst is 16.3%. But this does not mean 77-84% of problems go unsolved.

What it actually means is that most people get help, fix their print, and never come back to say so. They got what they needed and moved on. The confirmed fix rate is a measure of how often people close the loop, not how often the community actually helps.

This matters more than you'd think. Every time someone confirms a fix it becomes usable data. It tells the next person who has the same problem on the same printer with the same filament what actually worked. When you don't come back and confirm, that data is lost.

So here's a small ask. If someone helped you fix your print, come back and say so. Even a quick "this worked" reply makes a difference. You're not just being polite, you're contributing to a knowledge base that helps the next person who has the same problem.

The community gives a lot. Closing the loop costs almost nothing.

What problem has been hardest for you to get help with?

What info would you like to see in the next post? Full seasonal trends?

Two important caveats before anyone gets defensive about their printer.

First, more posts does not mean worse printer. It means more users, more active community, or lower barrier to asking for help. A printer with 1,600 posts might just be the most popular printer right now.

Second, not every person asking for help includes their printer model in the post. This list only counts posts where a printer was actually identified, so the real numbers are higher across the board and some printers are likely underrepresented.

With that said, here are the top 10 printers by help request volume over the past year:

1. Bambu Lab P1S - 1,651 posts

2. Bambu Lab A1 - 1,310 posts

3. Creality Ender 3 - 665 posts

4. Bambu Lab A1 Mini - 608 posts

5. Creality Ender 3 V3 SE - 586 posts

6. Creality Ender 3 V2 - 507 posts

7. Creality Ender 3 Pro - 457 posts

8. Bambu Lab X1C - 455 posts

9. Creality Ender 3 V3 KE - 270 posts

10. Bambu Lab P2S - 256 posts

Bambu dominating the top spots makes sense given how much market share they have taken in the last two years. The Ender 3 family showing up five times in the top 10 is a testament to how many of them are still out there printing.

What's your printer and does it surprise you to see it on the list or not on it?

TL;DR: Bambu Lab and Creality Ender 3 dominate help requests but that reflects popularity not reliability. Data only counts posts where a printer was identified so all numbers are conservative.

(Edited for typo)

I have been building a tool that pulls and analyzes posts from r/FixMyPrint and wanted to share what the data actually looks like after a year of issues and fixes.

Here are the top 10 most reported problems ranked by post count:

1. First layer not sticking - 1,951 posts
2. Rough top surface / pillowing - 1,917 posts
3. Stringing and oozing - 1,406 posts
4. Blobs and zits - 1,320 posts
5. Under extrusion - 1,281 posts
6. Layer shift - 1,138 posts
7. Ringing and ghosting - 923 posts
8. Layer separation - 871 posts
9. Clogging and heat creep - 764 posts
10. Warping and lifting - 744 posts

What surprised me is how close the first two are. Almost as many people struggle with rough top surfaces as with first layer adhesion, but first layer gets way more attention in guides and troubleshooting resources.

Across all 10 categories the confirmed fix rate sits between 18 and 23 percent, meaning roughly 1 in 5 posts ends with OP confirming something actually worked. The rest either got generic advice, no response, or the person never came back to update.

What issue has given you the most trouble personally? Curious if the rankings match what people actually experience.

TL;DR: Analyzed a year of r/FixMyPrint posts. First layer and rough top surfaces are the most common issues. Only 1 in 5 posts ends with a confirmed fix. What's your worst issue?

(Edited to add TL;DR)

Been quietly adding a printer profile database to FixMyPrint over the past few weeks and just shipped it today.

Each printer has:

• Full specs (build volume, max temps, bed type, nozzle sizes, firmware)
• Known issues specific to that printer. Things like the P1S PTFE hotend temperature limit, PETG sticking too hard to textured PEI, AMS tangling on high humidity
• Filament compatibility ratings for PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU, Nylon and PC with notes specific to that printer
• Maintenance tips and popular upgrades

128 printers covered so far across Bambu Lab, Creality, Elegoo, Prusa, Anycubic, Sovol, Voron, Qidi and more.

Inside the Settings Generator, when you pick your printer it now shows relevant warnings inline. So if you select PETG on a textured PEI printer it flags the adhesion issue before you start the print.

The database will keep growing as the app gets more usage and I get better data on which printers have specific quirks worth flagging.

You can browse all the profiles without an account at fixmyprint3d.com/printer-profiles

Don't see your printer? Let me know and Ill add it to the next update. Have any known issues that are missing? Let me know what you want to see.

I put together a set of free troubleshooting guides covering the most common 3D printing failures. Each one goes deeper than the usual "dry your filament" advice, with specific causes, exact slicer settings by filament type, and step-by-step fixes.

Covers:

- Stringing and oozing

- Warping and bed adhesion

- Layer separation and delamination

- Under and over extrusion

- Ghosting and ringing

- Z-banding

- Wet filament (drying temps for every filament)

- Elephant's foot, pillowing, blobs, bridging, supports and more

All free, no account needed: https://www.fixmyprint3d.com/guides

Will add more if anyone thinks things should be added!