I am, by nature, an even-keeled, patient man. Thirty years in IT will do that to you: you learn that most things get fixed by staying calm and working the problem. I have even twice been awarded the “cool under pressure” award at the company holiday party over the years. And yet here I am, checking a Kickstarter shipping estimate the way a seven-year-old with an ADHD diagnosis and a wish list a mile long checks the calendar two weeks before Christmas. There’s a printer-shaped box somewhere in a factory in China right now, and I want it now, not in November.
This is a backer report, not a review. I don’t have the machine yet: nobody does, except for a handful of early YouTube reviewers. What I do have is a pledge, a backer number, a healthy dose of anticipation, and an equally healthy dose of skepticism about how the next few months are actually going to go. That’s worth writing down before the printer arrives and reality either confirms or wrecks my expectations.
Why this one got me, specifically
I’ve been running a Prusa MK3S+ since 2021 and added the MMU3 multi-material unit a couple years ago, and I love what it does: filament efficiency is genuinely excellent, next to none of the purge waste you get with cheaper multi-color setups. What it does not do is print fast. Some of my smaller multi-color pieces take over 14 hours on the Prusa. That’s the trade I signed up for, and mostly I’ve made peace with it.
The 3D printing world has spent the last couple of years throwing solutions at the multi-material problem. Tool changers like the Prusa XL have been around since 2023: genuinely capable, genuinely expensive. Snapmaker’s U1 landed in 2025 with an honest four-toolhead changer and blew past $20 million on Kickstarter, and it’s already shipping retail. Bambu Lab took a different road entirely with a dual-nozzle approach in a single printhead, clever, but still fundamentally one nozzle doing the work at a time. Affordable, multi-tool systems are going to become the standard for even casual hobbyists, not just for the propeller-head 3D tinkerers like me. (But that is an article for another time.)
The Sovol M1D is the first machine I’ve seen that puts a genuine IDEX gantry: two independently moving print heads, the same basic architecture as my Prusa’s dual-extruder cousins, together with an honest tool changer, up to seven heads total, swapping in about five seconds (or at least that is the timing that the marketing videos claim), plus near-instant swaps between the two print heads themselves. That combination, on paper, gets you the parallel-printing speed of IDEX and the material flexibility of a tool changer in the same box. Nobody had shipped that combination before. That’s what got my attention: not another spin on an existing idea, but two ideas nobody had bothered mashing together yet.
The campaign itself was its own kind of spectacle
I signed up for launch notifications the moment I saw the specs, and I backed the Advanced edition the night the Kickstarter went live: July 28, 2026, 10:00 AM EST. I’m backer #580 of what would eventually become 2,063 total backers, and I’d have been lower in that count if I hadn’t fumbled around figuring out how Kickstarter reward tiers actually work. I’d never backed a crowdfunding project before this one.
The campaign blew past its roughly $191,000 goal before most of the backers who’d eventually pledge had even heard about it. It crossed $1 million in 13 minutes. It crossed $2 million a bit over two hours in. By the time the campaign closed in late August, it had pulled in HK$25,418,637, somewhere north of $3.2 million USD, from those 2,063 backers. Watching a funding bar move that fast, for a machine that didn’t exist yet outside of demo units, is its own kind of entertainment.
I locked in the Advanced edition: the enclosed, heated-chamber version, because I want the option to work with materials that actually need chamber heat or fume mitigation down the road: ASA, PC, nylon, the stuff that punishes you and makes you question your life choices on an open frame. I paid the fully refundable $20 deposit before the campaign even opened, which reserved VIP pricing on top of whatever I backed at during the campaign. That’s not a discount you see at checkout, Sovol processes it after the fact: back at the Super Early Bird price during the campaign, and once the campaign wraps, they manually verify your deposit against your pledge and refund both the $20 deposit and an additional $100 VIP discount straight back to your original payment method. Net result for Advanced: $1,499, shipping not included. It felt like a rounding error at the time. It did not feel like a rounding error once the actual shipping bill showed up separately: HK$933.00, about $118.92 USD, which ate most of that $100 VIP discount right back up.
What I’m actually nervous about
I want to be honest about the skepticism, because the marketing videos won’t be.
My Prusa needed real tinkering when I got it in 2021: calibration, tuning, learning its quirks. Same thing again when I added on the MMU3. Once I got it dialed in, though, it just works, the way Prusa’s whole reputation is built on. Expensive, not always as polished out of the box as some of the Chinese-market competitors, but reliable in a way that’s earned my trust over four years. (I mean, that’s the kind of trust where I’ll kick off a 23-hour print and barely glance at whether the first layer went down properly before walking away completely till the next day.) I’m expecting to go through a similar tinkering period with the M1D. I’m fine with that going in. What I don’t know yet is whether the far end of that tunnel looks like my Prusa’s rock-solid reliability, or something less settled, because this is genuinely new mechanical territory, and time is the only thing that actually answers that question.
A few things feed that hesitation. Early adopters of Sovol’s larger-format machines have reported print profiles and general polish lagging well behind the initial release for months. And the M1D’s own campaign reveal livestream was rough, noticeably clunkier than the polished marketing footage that had been circulating before the campaign opened. That gap between “how it looks in the trailer” and “how it looks live” is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to hold my full verdict until I’ve actually run filament through the thing.
On the build side, from what I’ve seen so far: read the actual setup manual. It comes out of the box in reasonably good shape, nicely packaged and ready for assembly, but some of the bracket and mounting steps apparently aren’t as self-explanatory as you’d hope. This isn’t a Bambu, and I’ve made my peace with that: I’d rather have a machine I can actually get inside of. That’s also the thing I like most going in: the M1D runs on Klipper, fully embracing the open-source world and customizable if I so choose to dive down that rabbit hole, instead of the walled garden some other manufacturers have chosen to build. I want to be able to tune this thing myself when something needs tuning, not wait on a firmware update from a vendor who’s decided I don’t need to see under the hood. I can even print to it completely offline without my printer having to run the job through a cloud someplace in China, which, if you’re fuzzy on what “the cloud” actually is versus just marketing shorthand, is worth a look at Cloud Computing Explained. I like that about my Prusa and I will like that about my Sovol.
The math that made my wallet happy
Right as the M1D campaign closed, Prusa announced that the CORE One L, their larger enclosed printer, was suddenly available for pre-order with the new INDX 8-tool system, also shipping in November. Hmmm, funny timing. Prusa’s own INDX tool-changer system had been estimated at $499 for the 4-tool version and $699 for the 8-tool version when it was first announced. When official retail orders actually opened in April 2026 for the CORE One+, those numbers had climbed to $749 and $999 in the US (669€ and 899€ in Europe). Reaction in the Prusa community was mixed, with plenty of people pointing at manufacturing costs and import tariffs as the reason the final price landed well above the original tease. I understand that reality happens somewhere between announcement and shipping, but for a brand that is generally WAY more expensive than everyone else, that extra cost doesn’t land well.
Prusa now sells the whole thing pre-assembled: CORE One L+ with the 8-tool INDX toolchanger already installed, no separate kit required. With import duties factored in and before adding so much as an extra print sheet or a filtration module, that comes to $2,989.00 at checkout. I checked, mostly out of morbid curiosity, what two M1D Advanced units would have cost me at my locked-in VIP price of $1,499 each: $2,998. Nine dollars. That’s the entire gap between one fully assembled, duty-paid Prusa CORE One L+ INDX and two complete M1D Advanced printers with independent dual toolheads between them.
I love my Prusa. It just works, and that’s worth real money. But my single M1D Advanced pledge came in at roughly half of what one Prusa bundle costs, and I get independent dual toolheads out of the deal, not just a tool changer bolted onto a single-nozzle machine. Neither number includes shipping, that’s extra on both, and Prusa’s, coming out of Europe, is likely to run at least as much as the $118.92 I paid to get the M1D from China. The gap doesn’t close. My wallet is happy with that math today. Whether my patience is still happy with it in December is a separate question, and the honest answer is: ask me again once I’ve printed something.
What I’m actually waiting to try
Setting the anxiety aside for a second, the part I’m genuinely excited about is the material combinations I can’t easily do on the Prusa. Dissolvable or easy-break supports printed in a completely different material from the actual part. PLA supports under a TPU print, maybe, so the support structure snaps away instead of fighting the flexible part on removal. I’ve got a running list of small multi-color prints: baby dragons, mini sharks, fidget toys, the usual bench-testing fare, that I’m timing mentally against what the M1D should be able to do. If a piece that takes 14 hours on the Prusa lands somewhere around 4 hours here, that’s not a marginal upgrade. That’s a different way of working.
There’s also the genuinely weird idea rattling around in my head about printing wearable pieces, shoes specifically, using disparate materials for structure versus flex in the same object. I have no idea if that’s actually practical yet. That’s exactly the kind of experiment this machine is built to let me find out. (Don’t even get me started on the custom Mando armor set I am planning out for Halloween 2027 that I can do easily with the faster speeds and large build volume. Yipes! That is an entirely new set of anticipation building there.)
The takeaway
I’m glad I backed this. Genuinely. The idea is novel enough, and Sovol’s track record solid enough, that I think the bet was reasonable. But a crowdfunded printer is a bet on a company’s execution as much as it’s a purchase, and the real verdict doesn’t land until the box is open, the brackets are torqued down, and I’ve run enough filament through it to know whether “just works” is in this machine’s future the way it eventually was for my Prusa.
November’s the target. I’ll report back once I’m past the tinkering and actually printing, for better or worse.