Classic enshitification arc. They were a fast growing startup that engineered really good printers and software. People, especially newbies flocked to them because their software was easy to use and their initial print quality was very good without any tweaking or tuning.

But they were backed by private equity, and had to start showing higher and higher returns, they started locking in users with their proprietary cloud services.

They’ve been locking users in more and more recently, and just a few weeks ago, threatened a user with legal action for posting AGPL code up on their own repo. The code enabled users to use their Bambu printers without needing to sign into Bambu’s cloud.

Now there is a big community backlash and Bambu is having to do PR damage control.