Announcing the Open Material License beta

Formlabs News
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Last November, we announced the Open Material License (OML) for Form 3/L generation printers. I’m excited to share that we’re launching an exclusive beta program for OML and are looking for interested users.

As a reminder - you can use the Open Material License with the Print Settings Editor to experiment with any third-party 405nm resin. If you are developing a custom resin or are targeting specific performance, this combination is for you.

If you’d like to join the OML beta program, please reply here (or DM me) with your usecase and the third-party resin you’d like to use.

We only have 5 spots on the beta so we’ll go with whoever reaches out first!

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Bumping this up one more time! Really exciting opportunity and we opened up a few more spots to include more people. Please reach out to @hasank or me via DM or reply here!

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For those of us who have been with Formlabs since the beginning, the idea that we have to pay thousands of dollars for the “privilege” of using third-party resins (especially castable resins) is not customer friendly. Huge Formlabs fangirl here, but most likely won’t take a leap of faith for the Form 4 because of the license fee. $6,000-9,000?? Really disappointed.

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@katkramer thanks for the feedback. Still contemplating final pricing, so this is valuable input.

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Totally agree greedy slap in the face… especially with being able to do it with form 1/2 back in the day i believe.selling my 3+

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@dogichow As a Form 2 and Form 3L owner I’m also disappointed by this open material license; drives users away from an already expensive ecosystem

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The only acceptable “price” for me is zero. Call it a “loyalty discount” if you must. Formlabs seems to be the only company on the planet doing this. I can buy ten printers with comparable quality for the same price as a Form 4. The Open Material License is shortsighted in the face of the competition you guys didn’t have eight years ago when I bought my Form 2.

Most companies seek out ways to delight their customers. This is the most boneheaded, loyalty-sabotaging move I’ve ever seen from a tech company. It would be like Apple saying “great, you just spent $3,500 on a new iPad, but to use it, you need to spend $9,000 on iOS.” Or BMW saying “congratulations on your new $80,000 car, now you have to have a subscription to use the seat heaters.”

My Form 2 was one of the most exciting purchases I’ve ever made in my life. It brought me unimaginable joy. I was really excited about the Form 4, and was looking forward to buying one. Learning about the Open Material License a couple months ago took all that joy away. In eight years I have evangelized Formlabs quality, telling others that the extra expense is well worth it…

And what you guys don’t seem to care about is it people who are into 3D printing are tinkerers. Yes, many people like me were new to the technology and could appreciate a straightforward and “Apple-like” system that was user-friendly. But most people who are 3D printing would prefer a more cost-effective solution, even if it means taking more time to tweak the system.

I never thought that I would be that person trying third-party resins because I appreciated the cartridge system and its ease of use. But when Formlabs could not provide a workable castable resin solution, we were forced to look outside the walled garden, and I was thankful to have Open Mode available. It was a selling point when I told others about my Formlabs printer. I can’t tell you how many people pushed back on my recommendation for this printer because they said it was a closed system and could not use third-party resins. I was able to set them straight.

But in eight years, Formlabs’ castable resins were never developed properly…instead of licensing other resins like Bluecast, Formlabs stuck to their guns, putting out inferior resins that NEVER worked consistently. Our ONLY option was to go to a third-party resin.

Now I find myself at a crossroads. Stick with Formlabs, or stick with Bluecast. Every time Formlabs came out with a new resin, I would spend thousands in tanks, resin, new investment, and precious metal, doing testing that Formlabs SHOULD have done. I didn’t know any better, but thought we were advancing the technology for everyone. But at this point, for an Open Material License of $5,999 to $8,999, I would swap out the printer and keep the Bluecast.

And I might add, even a “reduced” license of $1,000 won’t cut it, either. ZERO is the correct amount.

You guys need to understand your competition. Your competition has nothing like this, and even as a loyal customer, this is a dealbreaker. This makes me incredibly sad. And I’m angry that a company I’ve revered for so long has done this to customers. It shows a complete lack of understanding of the market, a complete lack of respect for customers.

You have my number. Feel free to call me to discuss. I’d prefer not to talk with the guy who told me we could “break our printers if allowed to use third party resin.” That was insulting.

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Its just as the Nylon prices for the Fuse 1 series. Insanely overpriced.

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Totally agree! hi-way robbery… for something that shouldn’t even be users responsibility… NOW if this was just for 3rd party resin companies to pay to get their stuff approved (yes this is a ton of testing and approvals etc…… that would be a very different deal… end users should just be able to get settings to put in and buy the resin on amazon…etc…This open license should not be user facing… only 3rd party resin manufacturer facing… if they want to sell their resins to the formlabs users.

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Agree with Kat. Like my form 3. Casters hate the purple castable resin. Lots of porosity.

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I think the issue here is that Formlabs, just like inkjet printer companies, struggles to make a continued stream of income from the actual hardware and therefore have to make most of their sales off of the resins and accessories. This usually leads to companies becoming very anti-consumer and making their items proprietary and create other artificial limitations to keep the users locked into their closed ecosystem.

Proof of this is that the Form 1 and 2 were able to use any resin, but even with the Form 2 they started going the anti-consumer route and blocking features when using “open” mode. They also started putting chips into the trays and resin containers starting with the Form 2. Yes, they could claim it adds some additional functionality, but in reality there was also a money making incentive to do so just like the inkjet printer companies did. Then when they found out people were able to hack these chips on the resin containers, allowing use of any resin they wanted, Formlanbs went out of their way to change these chips and update the firmware to try and make this hack obsolete. Then it got even worse with the Form 3 series when they completely removed the ability to use any third party resin.

Overall, this is not a good practice for any company that cares about their reputation and customers. It also starts to get into a legal grey area because HP and others ran into legal problems for doing similar things in the past with their inkjet printers.

Another thing Formlabs needs to realize is that they are no longer the only desktop resin printer on the market and haven’t been for a while. They failed to do anything about this for a while and fell behind when the LCD based printers start coming to market and Formlabs was still using lasers. That’s why they recently released their own LCD based version albeit a little too late.

If Formlabs still wants to stay competitive, instead of resting on their laurels, they are going to need to embrace the use of third-party resins and make the feature free or very cheap.

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Agreed!… so say we all i suspect!… — i’m selling my form 3+ at the moment not totally for that reason. but it really was a slap on the face ontop of everything else.

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Formlabs is the (only) company that milks the customer both on hardware AND on consumables.

When you buy a cheap paper printer you’re going to pay a lot for inks. And when you buy an expensive paper printer the inks are very cheap. Like with the ecotanks for example, it’s an expensive printer but the inks are almost free.
They don’t milk you both ways, LOL!

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Clearly you’ve never dealt with HP or Canon; heck HP was even bricking their printers when people used third-party inks. Third-party ink cartridges brick HP printers after 'anti-virus' update

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I’m not refering to 3rd party inks. I spoke about ecotanks (Epson), where the original ink bottles (70ml) are just 10 euros.

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My point is still valid because HP and Canon are expensive for both and I was including the other toxic stuff HP was doing. Regardless, Formlabs is going down this path which is not good.

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Yeah, my results were absolutely crusty prints. What was happening I couldn’t even describe as porosity. The biggest issue I had was that Formlabs for the longest time would say there were “no problems with the castable resins,” and that “plenty of jewelers and casting houses were getting great results.” But when it came time to share those methods with actual users, who didn’t have as much casting experience as those other customers, Formlabs would give vague responses like “every casting setup is different so we can’t provide temperatures and burnout schedules other than what’s on our website.” EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE SELLING THE RESIN AT $299 A LITER, and it was THEIR product. With zero support, how were we supposed to be successful? BlueCast had a Facebook page where the seller and users could share tips, and they earned my business. The resin was comparably priced, but came with excellent support. At that point I stopped using Formlabs castable resins, although I would still use Formlabs’ gray resin for everything else.

At one point I was invited to participate in a test because I had been very involved in the forums. Formlabs sent out four or five models for us to cast. One was a very dainty ring, another was a very heavy bracelet. When I asked for some guidelines on how they wanted it cast, they said just use the burnout and temperature settings you think would be appropriate. I tried casting the first piece with the purple castable wax, and it was a disaster. I never cast the rest of them.

What I would have liked to have seen is that there would be a representative of different casting setups. Maybe a basic setup with an Electro-Melt and a Kaya Cast vacuum setup or a centrifugal casting machine. The jewelers who have been casting for years would probably have more experience in doing this and much more expensive setups. But the small manufacturers who are doing this out of their garage would have a more basic setup and need more guidance FROM THE SELLER/MANUFACTURER OF THE RESIN…WHICH WAS FORMLABS.

Instead, Formlabs leaned on us, but after years of trying to get this to work, I still didn’t have a workable solution with castable resin. So forgive me for venting so much, but I feel very betrayed. For all the years that we wasted investment, precious metals, resin, trays…trying to find a solution and share with others what we learned out of the goodness of our hearts. Formlabs built a wonderful community where people tried to help others who were experiencing the same challenges. And now they repay us by charging us thousands of dollars to access third-party resins that actually work? That just hurts my heart.

Here’s an example of a pendant printed in purple castable that was 1.8 mm thick in sterling silver, even thickness, sprued correctly. I used the burnout schedule on the Formlabs site, and it was cured according to Formlabs’ instructions.

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IMG_82981124×622 196 KB

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Thanks for the post Kat and your ability to verbalize the problems we’ve all had casting our models using Formlabs casting resins. As a small manufacturer I can’t imagine the cost of recasting repairing recasting more and more to find a solution to the inherent problems using these castable resins.

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We just started using the Open Material License and love how easy the set up was on the Form 4 we had our first trial running in 20 minutes and was even able to get something to print with great success now we are onto the next steps of research to figure out curing times

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@MattRForerunner I assume you were able to take advantage of the “discounted” price of $2499? I still can’t justify that. I have the money, and can afford it, but I can’t justify it. Not when Open Mode was free, and nobody else in the industry charges to allow users to use third-party resins.

I’m in the process of outfitting a new art workshop, so I have a lot of equipment to purchase.

But Formlabs promised to update users with the “certified” resin providers earlier this year, but we haven’t seen anything yet. And one of the resin providers that I’d like to be able to use said that Formlabs users make up a VERY small number of their customers, so they don’t see an advantage in going through the process to become certified. Most of their customers have other brands of printers that don’t require certification…they simply test and provide settings for those resins directly to customers.

I have no problem purchasing basic resins from Formlabs…I appreciate the ease-of-use and convenience. But for castable resins, I do not want to futz around with Formlabs resins anymore because it’s so hit-or-miss. Casting precious metals is expensive…you’re supposed to add 50% new/clean metal each time you cast. I just don’t have the patience for bad casts anymore.

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