Job queue and costing for 3D print farms

The idea

A seller with twelve printers in the garage and an Etsy queue of forty orders runs scheduling in their head: which machine is free, which job fits, what prints overnight. OctoPrint and Bambu’s software manage individual machines, but nothing manages the backlog across a farm, so machines sit idle while orders age and the operator plays air traffic control from memory.

The quieter killer is pricing. Most farm operators set prices by copying competitors and have never computed true unit cost including electricity, machine wear, failure rate, and post-processing labour. A meaningful share of their catalogue sells below cost and they do not know it. A products table with a red below-cost flag is worth the subscription on the day they first open it.

Who pays

The operator pays $15/month, free up to 2 printers so hobbyists convert as they grow. The buyer runs 3 to 30 printers selling on Etsy or via direct orders, a segment that exploded with cheap reliable Bambu machines. Distribution is r/3Dprinting and r/functionalprint, print-farm YouTube (a large genre with operators who love showing their setups), and 3D printing Discord servers.

MVP scope

• Printer roster and product library with per-product filament grams and print hours
• Drag-and-drop scheduling board with per-printer timelines and job states
• Failure handling that re-queues jobs and logs wasted filament
• True-cost calculator with margin flags on every product
• CSV and Etsy order-export import mapped to products by SKU
• Skip for v1: printer API integrations, live webcam feeds, STL management, marketplace listing sync, and multi-user accounts

Build FarmQueue, a job scheduling and costing app for small 3D print farms. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, auth), Stripe for subscriptions.

Core flow: the operator registers printers (name, model, build volume, hourly wear rate, wattage) and defines products (name, filament grams, print hours, filament type). Orders arrive via CSV upload or an Etsy order-export import (parse Etsy's standard CSV format, matching line items to products by SKU); each order expands into print jobs. The scheduling board is the heart: a column per printer, and the operator drags jobs onto printers, with each column showing a running timeline of estimated start/finish based on job durations stacked in order. Jobs have states: queued, printing, done, failed (failed re-queues with one tap and logs the wasted filament).

The costing calculator prices any product from inputs: filament cost per kg, grams used, print hours, electricity rate x wattage, machine wear per hour, failure-rate percentage buffer, and labour minutes for post-processing. It outputs true unit cost and margin at the current sale price, flagging any product selling below cost in red on the products page.

Pages: scheduling board, orders list, products with cost/margin table, printers, import, settings, billing.

Non-obvious details: no printer APIs or OctoPrint integration in v1, statuses are manual, which keeps it compatible with every printer brand including Bambu farms.

Pricing: free for 2 printers, $15/month unlimited.