Prusa has long been a leader in upgradeable 3D printers - don’t throw the old one away, buy an upgrade! Thus you could at various times update a MK2 ("Mark Two") to MK3, MK3 to MK3.5, MK3.5+ to MK4, MK4 to MK4S, and most dramatically, completely rebuild your MK4S into a Core ONE corexy printer. All at significantly less than the cost of the new printer. For example, if you have the Core ONE, the website currently states:

Current CORE One owners can easily upgrade to the new CORE One+!
You can either download the free print-it-yourself files from Printables
or purchase the official upgrade kit from our e-shop.

That upgrade kit, by the way, sells for US$15, plus shipping.

Significantly, Prusa just announced—​in conjunction with the printhead/extruder experts at BondTech-- yet another upgrade for the Core ONE, the INDX; see the Prusa Announcement and the BondTech page (BondTech prices as of November 2025 do not cover the complete Prusa kit). The INDX sounds spifftastic on the web sites - it adds 4 or 8 colors and each has a ($35!) mini-print-head resulting in basically zero wasted filament when switching colors. It’s not cheap, of course. On https://blog.prusa3d.com/introducing-the-indx-fast-and-affordable-8-material-printing-exclusively-on-the-core-one_125242/ they say that the early-adopter "Stage 1" will start in Q1 2026 but this discounted "Founder’s Edition" was sold out in an hour or so on Feb 18 (cue massive web-site overload music), and I missed the chance to get in :-( Prusa’s previous multi-color attachment, the MMU3, has up to 5 colors and half the price of the INDX but is kinda Rube Goldberg.

All that aside, I have to wonder if Prusa is losing ground. They are pursued by many Asian makers: Bambu, SnapMaker, Creality, Sovol, and more. To take one example, SnapMaker’s U1 lists at $999, is on sale this week for $849, offers 4 colors max, but has 4 or 5 second swap time. The INDX claims range from 8 to 12 seconds. That’s each time you swap filaments. A decent print may have hundreds or even thousands of print swaps. Adding up the difference between 12 seconds and 5, spread over a thousand swaps, is 7000 seconds, or 7000/60 or about 115 minutes extra printing time. That Core ONE + 4-color INDX (bought separately, at today’s listed prices) would cost US$1,319 + US$499, or US$1818. You could shave a bit off by assembling the Core ONE from a kit at US$1009. Or, you could buy two of the Snapmakers and have some redundancy. Why, then, go with the Prusa?

Why Prusa?

Prusa has (like any other tech) curated a loyal (occasionally rabid) fan base. They (and I, hopefully not rabidly) will tell you that Prusa’s advantages are worth the extra cost:

  • Company founder Josef Prusa practically invented consumer-priced 3D printing (based on the earlier RepRap project).

  • Ethical: Prusas are designed and manufactured in Europe, where workers are paid a decent wage.

  • Continual upgrades: free firmware updates for life, always a hardware upgrade path.

  • Almost everything is open source, including the hardware.

  • Prusa provides a complete ecosystem:

    • They maintain the open-source PrusaSlicer (a fork of Slic3r), which includes profiles for competitors' printers and filaments.

    • They make their own filament Prusament

    • They sponsor Printables.com, a 3d printing model download site with contests, store credits for uploads and downloads, and more.

    • Flexible inputs: USB stick, WiFi, wired Ethernet, with both localnet web and cloud-based control (including a mobile app for the latter).

  • Some people like to modify hardware, and the systems are largely modder-friendly.

  • Reputation for reliability: uptime really matters in commercial printing!

  • Security: all versions can be operated completely offline; the Core ONE L (large) has two WiFi-free options; just remove one screw and unplug the WiFi card, or order the special version that excludes even the connections for the WiFi card (this is both important for security-paranoid organizations, and ironic, since the earliest consumer 3D printers didn’t even have networking).

  • Huge communities of helpful users.

So all factors weighed, I will be keeping my Core ONE and plan eventually to get the INDX upgrade, though I’ll have to let others be the "early adopters" (remembering the line about how you tell the pioneers).

P.S. I’m now accepting offers for my MMU3 kit, which I never got round to assembling.