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.
Pay once, from €79. You supply the Raspberry Pi; we supply the image, a year of updates and someone to ask. After that the appliance keeps working exactly as it is, for as long as you use it, and Bambuddy itself keeps updating from the admin panel. Only the appliance layer stops getting updates.
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 from any Raspberry Pi dealer, plus a case you print yourself. 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, 64 GB or more
Endurance-rated if you can. The two system copies claim 21 GB before any of your data, and the appliance checks the card on every boot.
A case you print
Download the 3MF and print it. The Pi is held in it by 4 × M2.5 × 5 screws and 4 × M2.5 nuts — the only parts not on the list above.
Read the quick start before you buy anything — and print the case
The full setup guide — the parts list, flashing the card, the setup wizard, adding your first printer, updates, backups and every recovery path. Twenty pages, written for someone who has never opened Raspberry Pi Imager. It is the same booklet buyers 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.
Download the quick start (PDF, 0.9 MB) Kurzanleitung auf Deutsch (PDF) Download the case (3MF, 1.2 MB)
The case is free to print and needs no licence. It takes 4 × M2.5 × 5 screws and 4 × M2.5 nuts, which the booklet lists with the rest of the parts.
What it costs
Buy it once, per appliance. The first year of updates and support is included. After that it keeps working as it is and Bambuddy itself still updates; only appliance updates and support stop.
- 12 months of image updates and support
- Keeps working after that, and Bambuddy itself still updates
- Best-effort support from the maintainer, through GitHub issues
- Non-commercial use
- Every appliance update, for as long as the appliance exists
- 12 months of best-effort support from the maintainer, through GitHub issues
- Non-commercial use
- Every update and support, for as long as you subscribe
- Commercial use, invoiced to your company
- A direct line by email, support@bambuddy.cool, and your requests handled first
- A response time in writing: normally the next working day, two at the most
Sold through our online reseller Paddle.com, the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Full refund within 14 days, no reason needed. Terms · Refund policy
Four 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 or Lifetime; a shop with two is Business.
It is yours. After the first year your appliance keeps working exactly as it is, indefinitely. What stops is updates to the appliance layer (the admin panel, the setup wizard and the update tooling) and support. Bambuddy itself still updates from the admin panel, and Debian security updates keep coming. If you want every future appliance update, Lifetime includes them. A Business subscription that ends works the same way. Nothing is held hostage.
Per appliance, not per printer. One purchase covers one box, however many printers you point it at.
Business is support for the appliance, not for your print floor. It covers the box: the image, updates, registration, and faults in the appliance itself. It is not a support contract for running a fleet — not your network, not your printers, and not Bambuddy as an application. If that is what you need, it is a different conversation with a contract of its own, and €249 a year is not it.
What support actually means
One person answers it. Better to be exact about that now than to let you find out later.
Personal and Lifetime: through GitHub issues. Open an issue in the public issue tracker and say it is about the appliance; the maintainer answers there, on a best-effort basis. It is public, so never post your licence key in it.
Business: a direct line by email. Write to support@bambuddy.cool, and your request is handled before anything else. Both channels are answered Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 Central European Time — which covers most of the morning on the US east coast, and almost none of the working day on the west.
Your licence key, an order or a refund: email support@bambuddy.cool, whichever edition you have. Those need your details, and your details do not belong in public.
Business response time: normally the next working day, within two at the latest. What is promised is a response, not a fix. Nobody can honestly promise a fix by a date, and a promise is only worth what it is worth in the worst week of the year.
For up to fifteen working days a year, that clock stops. Holiday, illness, the ordinary reasons. Planned absences are announced a week ahead, by email and in the admin panel. One person cannot cover a whole year without them, and a promise that pretends otherwise is one that breaks when it matters.
What it does not cover: your network, your printers and their firmware, print results, hardware outside the list above, and your own containers or modifications. Nor Bambuddy itself as an application — bugs there belong in the public issue tracker, where they are handled the same for everyone, customer or not.
Already running Bambuddy somewhere else?
Moving an existing installation — Docker, or a server of your own — onto the appliance is a separate job at a fixed price, agreed and invoiced directly rather than sold with the appliance. It covers your data and your printer connections: not rebuilding containers, automations or system changes you have built around it.
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 a licence. 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
Five things, once on first boot and then about once a day: an identifier for the board, the batch the image came from, your licence key, the hardware model, and the appliance version. In between, once an hour, it asks one short question — is this licence still valid? — and sends nothing but its identifier and the token it was given. That check writes nothing on our side; it exists so a change to your licence reaches the box within the hour instead of a day later.
The identifier is derived from the Raspberry Pi's own serial number rather than generated at random, so it survives rewriting the card — that is what lets a licence follow the box through a reinstall instead of being spent twice. Your IP address is stored only as a salted hash, never in the clear, and only to notice one key running on several boards at once.
No printer data. No print history. No files. No user accounts. No credentials. Nothing about what you print, when, or with what. That is how a licence is matched to a box and offered updates — and if it never reaches us, the appliance works exactly the same. Bambuddy installed the ordinary way, from the installation guide, contacts nothing at all. Read the details.
Questions before you buy?
Ask, and the person who builds it answers — there is no sales team. No newsletter, no drip sequence: you get a reply, and that is all.
Want to read more first? Download the quick start (Deutsch), the case, read the documentation, or ask on Discord. Prefer email? appliance@bambuddy.cool.