Welcome to the Maker Freedom Ratings project

Proudly sailing under the Sign of the Golden Benchy!

Available Pages:

• Products - View all products with their ratings
• Vendors - Average rating per vendor, and product lists
• Questions - View all questions and their possible answers
• Prompt - Generate a prompt for LLMs to evaluate products
• Login - Log in, request account, or change your password

About the Maker Freedom Ratings website

3D printing has been a technology that promotes autonomy, decentralization, the right to repair, and the freedom to tinker. But those virtues don’t maintain themselves; they have to be guarded against capture by rent-seekers.

The aim of this website is to help 3D-printer users and enthusiasts exert market pressure on 3D printer vendors to head off rent-seeking, keep the technology open, and preserve user privacy.

We do this by maintaining a ratings database, grading printers (and laser cutters) on how well their design and implementation choices support maker freedom.

What you can do

You can immediately browse device ratings and vendors.

You are not logged in. After logging in or creating an account, you can submit updates that answer the questions about devices needed to calculate their rating.

To help you research devices, you can generate an LLM prompt that should get you useful information.

How the ratings work

This is not a review site. We evaluate devices based on the answers to a set of specific, objective questions.

The set of questions is expected to change, probably getting longer, over time. This means that the rating of a device may fluctuate up and down as the award system evolves. This is a feature, not a bug.

We are specifically not interested in covering questions unrelated to freedom and privacy issues. If you want to do that, feel free to clone our software and start your own ratings site.

Some questions are more important than others, so ours have goodness weights. The rating of a device is the goodness weight of all its questions divided by the maximum possible goodness a device can have.

The weights are set by the site administrators and are visible on the questions page. We expect there will be arguments about them. We also expect you to found your own awards website if you can't live with our weighting.

You can join our Discord server ↗️ to be part of the discussion about how to improve the Ratings

How you can help

You can register for an account and send us updates about devices. The more of them we cover, the more useful this site is.

Note that your report won't become publically visible until an administrator approves it. We're sorry about this, it's an anti-spam measure.

If you have a YouTube channel that reviews printers, talk up the MFR. The more people look to it as a quality guideline, the more pressure we implicitly exert on vendors to play nice.

If you are a printer producer, feel free to use the MFR in your advertising. And if your MFR is below average, you should fix that.

Content policy

We are big fans of freedom of speech, but this site is not a message board - if you want one of those, you know where to find them. Off-topic, spammy, or abusive content in comments will be deleted without notice or appeal. Offsite links to bad content will also be deleted without notice or appeal. If you abuse this site, your account will be deleted.

Reporting problems and bugs

Have a problem with this site? Report it as an issue on our bugtracker.

Here are things not to report on the bugtracker: inaccuracies in the product data, spam and vandalism on this site, bad offsite links, proposals for amemdments to questions. Leave an issue note on this website instead; there are buttons to do this on the product-detail ad questions pages.

Colophon

The Maker Freedom Ratings engine was designed by Eric S. Raymond and vibe-coded with assistance from Clause 3.7 Sonnet, Grok 3, and gpt-4.1-mini. It's written in typed Python using Flask and SQLite.