Appliance
Self-hosting, without the hosting.
Bambuddy on a Raspberry Pi, as an appliance rather than a project. You write one image to a memory card and the box does the rest — no Docker to learn, no compose file to edit, no cloud account to create. Your prints, your data, your network.
An annual subscription, from October 2026. You supply the Raspberry Pi; we supply the image, every update to it, and someone to ask.
You keep your own hardware Nothing to ship, nothing to wait for Bambuddy itself stays free
What it does for you
Fifteen minutes from card to first print
Flash the image, plug in ethernet or join the appliance's own WiFi network, and a setup wizard opens in your browser. No screen, no keyboard.
Upgrades that undo themselves
A new Bambuddy version is pulled, started, and health-checked. If it doesn't come up, the appliance puts the old one back on its own.
Two copies of its own operating system
System updates are written to the spare copy and booted once to prove they work. A bad one falls back to the copy that was fine, by itself.
Its own admin panel
Temperature, power flags, disk, logs, updates and network — on a separate port, so you can still fix the box when Bambuddy itself is down.
Reach it from anywhere
Sign in to Tailscale from the panel and reach the appliance and its virtual printers remotely. No router ports opened, no cloud in the middle.
A way back from every state
A factory reset from the admin panel, or over SSH when the panel is unreachable, returns you to a fresh setup wizard.
What you need to buy
Four parts, all of them stocked by every Raspberry Pi dealer. Roughly €120–150 depending on where you shop, and it is yours — not rented from us.
Raspberry Pi 5, 4 GB
8 GB if you run a large fleet. A Pi 4 will not work: the two-copy update layout needs the Pi 5's bootloader.
The official 27 W supply
Undervoltage is the most common cause of a mysteriously unreliable Pi, and it shows up as dropped printer connections rather than an error.
The official Active Cooler
This box runs every hour of every day. A throttled Pi looks exactly like slow software.
microSD, 32 GB or more
64 GB recommended, endurance-rated if you can. The two system copies claim 21 GB before any of your data.
Read the quick start before you buy anything
The full setup guide — the parts list, flashing the card, the setup wizard, adding your first printer, updates, backups and every recovery path. Sixteen pages, written for someone who has never opened Raspberry Pi Imager. It is the same booklet subscribers get, and you can read all of it now.
If it does not look like something you want to do, that is a useful answer, and it cost you nothing.
What the subscription costs
Launch pricing, from October 2026. One year of updates and support, per appliance.
- The appliance image, and every update to it
- System updates that roll themselves back
- Best-effort support, by email, from the maintainer
- Non-commercial use
- Everything in Personal
- Commercial use
- A named channel, not a shared inbox
- An agreed response time, in writing
- Your questions ahead of the queue
Three things worth saying plainly
The tier is about how you use it, not how many printers you have. There is no metering, no seat count and nothing to police. A hobbyist with twelve printers is Personal; a shop with two is Business.
If you stop paying, your appliance keeps working. Exactly as it is, indefinitely. What stops is updates and support — not the software you already have. Nothing is held hostage.
Per appliance, not per printer. One subscription covers one box, however many printers you point it at.
It is still the same Bambuddy
The appliance runs the ordinary, open-source, AGPL-licensed Bambuddy — the same container you would install yourself. There are no exclusive features and no functionality locked behind the subscription. There never will be.
What you are paying for is everything around it: an image that is already configured, updates that are tested together and undo themselves when they go wrong, an admin panel for the box itself, and a person to ask when something is strange. If you would rather do all of that yourself, the installation guide has everything you need, costs nothing, and always will.
What it sends home
Three things, once on first boot and then about once a day: a random identifier it generates for itself, its hardware model, and its image version.
No printer data. No print history. No user accounts. No credentials. Nothing about what you print, when, or with what. That is how a subscription is matched to a box and offered updates — and if it never reaches us, the appliance works exactly the same. An appliance you build yourself from source contacts nothing at all. Read the details.
It goes on sale in October 2026
Leave your email and we will tell you when it does. No newsletter, no drip sequence — one message when there is something to buy, and a reply from the person who builds it if you ask a question, because there is no sales team.
Want to read more first? Download the quick start, read the documentation, or ask on Discord. Prefer email? appliance@bambuddy.cool.
Selling hardware, and want to include this?
We do not sell hardware and we are not looking for resellers. But if you already build and sell Raspberry Pi kits, shipping one with a prepaid subscription is something we are open to. Tell us about your shop.