About

What PrinterMon is

PrinterMon is a single control point for every printer on your network, regardless of make. Hobbyists with three printers run it. So do shops with a hundred printers across five farms in three buildings. If you have one printer and you're happy, you don't need this.

It runs as a Docker container on whatever you have spare. A Pi, a small Linux box, a VM, anything. Install is a compose file and a few commands.

Why I built it

I run a print operation with eight printers across four brands. One night I was trying to find a sliced file from a client job months earlier, while juggling OrcaSlicer's device tab, Bambu Studio's device tab, and the individual web UIs of every other machine. Each tab handled one printer at a time. Half my night was finding files, the other half was clicking through tabs to see who needed attention.

I looked at what existed. The tools that did what I needed all required handing my fleet over to a cloud service. I'm not doing that. So I wrote this.

What I won't do

Your files, your configs, your job history, your camera feeds, all of that stays on your machine. PrinterMon doesn't host them, mirror them, or back them up to the cloud. It can't, by design.

The only thing the node tells the printermon.com server is the make and model of each printer connected. That's it. I use that data to decide what hardware to support next. Everything else is yours, on your hardware, full stop.

Remote access works the same way. If you enable it, your node opens a Cloudflare tunnel and reports the URL up so it shows on your dashboard. The tunnel goes directly to your node. Traffic never passes through any server I run.

How it stays alive

The core install is free forever. Up to ten printers, a single account, full job archival, notifications, slicer uploads, optional remote access. No trial timer and no feature throttling.

If you outgrow that, paid add-ons cover the things bigger operations need. Multi-user logins for teams. Multi-node sync for fleets across sites. A few more on the way. The add-ons fund the work. There are no investors, no acquisition pressure, and no plan to flip this. It's a maker tool built by a maker.

If I disappear

Your install keeps working. PrinterMon doesn't phone home for permission. The local node runs without printermon.com being reachable. If the printermon.com server goes dark, the only thing affected is the remote-access URL showing up on your account dashboard. The URL itself still gets delivered through your notification channels. The container, the database, the printer connections, all of it is on your hardware.

I plan on a source-available license once I post the code, so the project itself can outlast me if it has to.

Who I am

Solo developer. I've been writing software for a couple of decades and 3D printing since 2014, when my first printer was a RepRap build with parts a kind stranger in Spain printed and mailed to me. I'm still in this for the same reason I was then: code is speech, and being able to type a thing and pull it out of a machine is the closest most of us get to magic. I'd like to keep doing that without an app store between me and my own printers.