One hundred thousand Original Prusa printers. Well, actually over 130,000 at the time of writing this article! I would have never imagined that this is where we would be in just a few years. It’s no longer just me and Michal working in a small basement. The Prusa Research team now has 433 people! And I would like to take this opportunity to thank every single one of them for contributing to our common goal. I have a great deal of respect for the entire team – we wouldn’t be where we are right now without you!

Do you wonder where it all began? Why did I buy my first 3D printer? And how many tons of Haribo bears we shipped in total? 🙂 For the past 6 months, we’ve been working on a short documentary, mapping everything from my first Mendel to the current stage of the company. You’ll see a ton of things we’ve never shown before – from powering the entire building with a diesel generator when our farm blew the building’s fuses, to the complex testing machines we’ve come up with for QC.

Free shipping worldwide!

And to celebrate this incredible milestone, starting today, for one whole week (until 7th July), we’re enabling worldwide free shipping for the Original Prusa i3 MK3S kits! And we worked hard to get the lead time down to essentially zero, so if you order the stand-alone MK3S kit, it should be on the way within just a few days. Of course, you can add a few selected products to your order (Prusaments, spare parts (if you have access to this section as an i3 owner) and i3 accessories), but keep in mind, that in this case, your lead time for the order will be 5-8 days. And BTW – all printers and upgrades (not only MK3S kits) are now available with the powder-coated sheets.

Note for everyone with the unshipped MK3s kit – we will send you a voucher to refund your shipping costs automatically on Monday/Tuesday next week – you don’t need to contact our support team with this.

What next?

I think this tweet from 2009 is kind of hilarious. Imagine if I bought a tablet instead. At the time I was a freshman at the University of Economics in Prague. You know, like all parents, mine wanted me to get a degree. I found myself having a lot of free time in the first semester, so both I and my brother Michal got into DJing and building our own music controllers. I was looking for a way to create my own knobs and faders, and that gets us why I bought my first 3D printer.

If you look at the date the tweet was posted, it’s almost exactly 10 years ago. Seeing what progress we’ve made in those 10 years gets me excited about the next decade, Star Trek Replicators, am I right? And that progress would not be possible without you! Thank you, everyone, who supported us on our journey, we would not be here without you. We will keep pushing the 3D technology forward, to make it more accessible and available for everyday people, while keeping the open-source spirit close to our hearts.

And as always, happy printing!