Prusa's multi-material toolchanger is no longer just a promise on a spec sheet. In a "State of INDX" update published July 3, Prusa confirmed that manufacturing partner Bondtech has begun shipping the first Founder's Edition INDX kits to early adopters — the earliest tangible sign that the toolchanger system is actually reaching doorsteps rather than just pre-order queues.
The Founder's Edition is the limited early-access batch that backers ordered first; the more broadly available Prusa Edition Conversion Kit for CORE One and CORE One+ printers is on a slightly later track. According to the update, that standard kit is scheduled to leave the factory by the end of July, with the entire first production batch shipped by the end of August. For a hardware project this ambitious — an upgrade kit that turns a single-nozzle CORE One into an 8-tool toolchanging system — hitting a stated shipping window at all is notable, let alone one that slipped by only weeks rather than quarters.
Firmware 6.6.1 Cleans Up Early Bugs
Shipping hardware is only half the story for a system this mechanically complex, and Prusa used the same update to note the release of firmware 6.6.1, aimed at stability issues reported by early Founder's Edition testers. Prusa's post doesn't itemize which specific faults the update patches, but for a toolchanger juggling up to eight independently parked and capped nozzles, this kind of unglamorous hardening work is exactly what determines whether a toolchanger becomes a reliable production tool or an expensive science project. Alongside 6.6.1, Prusa says four additional print profiles are in the pipeline, though it hasn't detailed which materials or use cases they target.
The update also goes into more depth on the mechanics that keep the system running smoothly between tool changes. A new waste bin, paired with a silicone nozzle cleaner, catches the small "priming pellets" purged at each nozzle swap — pellets that Prusa says average just 0.013–0.015g each, with enough capacity in the bin for a couple of smaller jobs or one large print before it needs emptying. Keeping tool alignment accurate across up to eight nozzles is handled by an Automatic Tool Offset Sensor, an inductive-sensor-based routine that Prusa says runs automatically at the start of every print, performing a four-pass X/Y-axis scan rather than requiring a one-time manual setup.
The Waste Problem — And Prusa's Numbers
INDX's core pitch has never been about color count alone — Bambu Lab's AMS and H2C systems already handle multiple materials — it's about what happens to the filament that isn't going into the part. Traditional single-nozzle multi-material systems purge and discard a slug of filament every time they switch colors, and on complex prints that waste can rival the mass of the finished object. INDX avoids that by using a physical toolchanger: each nozzle stays loaded with one material, parked and capped when not in use, so there's no purge tower and no filament swap through a single hot end.
Prusa's published test underscores just how large that gap can get. On an 81.7g finished print (Prusa's "Rocket Engine" comparison model), the INDX toolchanger generated 29g of waste, compared with as much as 696.4g on a competing system running the same model — roughly 24 times more waste, and enough plastic that the purge alone weighed more than eight of the finished parts. Prusa also pegs the cost of that wasted filament at $10 to $21 per print, depending on material. It's a favorable in-house benchmark, and Prusa naturally chose the print that flatters its own hardware, but the underlying mechanism — toolchanging versus single-nozzle purging — is real and well understood in the multi-material FDM space, not a marketing trick.
Prusa pegs the physical install at five to six hours, which is a serious undertaking for an upgrade kit, but not unreasonable given it's converting a single-tool printer into an 8-tool one.
Pricing: Still a Fraction of the H2C's Cost
The other major data point comes from All3DP's coverage of INDX's opened order book, whose headline reports that pricing has risen about $250 from the estimate Prusa gave at Formnext — a real sting for early backers who budgeted off the original figure. Prusa's own order-opening announcement puts current Prusa Edition first-batch pricing (tariffs included) at $749 for the 4-tool conversion kit and $999 for the 8-tool kit, both of which upgrade an existing CORE One or CORE One+ rather than requiring a whole new printer purchase.
Even accounting for that increase, INDX remains dramatically cheaper than the machine most often cited as its closest rival: Bambu Lab's H2C, a 7-color toolchanging printer that starts at $2,399 as a complete new machine. A larger build volume remains a genuine advantage of the H2C for makers printing bigger parts. But because INDX rides on hardware makers already own, its all-in cost — even after the price bump that frustrated early backers — stays a small fraction of what a comparable color count costs from Bambu.
Prusa is also using the update to plug software: a ColorMix halftoning feature has been added to both EasyPrint and PrusaSlicer, letting users blend a smaller set of physical filaments into a wider effective color range by dithering, similar to how inkjet printers stretch four ink cartridges into a full-color gamut. Combined with the 8-tool CMYKW+RGB hardware configuration, it suggests Prusa is chasing the same "print anything in any color" ambition that has driven interest in Bambu's AMS ecosystem, just via a fundamentally different — toolchanging rather than filament-switching — mechanism.
What It Means for Makers
If you already own a CORE One or CORE One+ and pre-ordered a conversion kit, the practical upshot is this: expect your kit to leave the factory by late July at the earliest, with the broader first batch trickling out through August, and expect firmware that Prusa says is meaningfully more stable than what the very first Founder's Edition units shipped with. Firmware maturity is one of the biggest open questions for any brand-new toolchanging mechanism, so continued rapid iteration is a good sign for reliability heading into the wider rollout.
For makers still deciding between platforms, the calculus is now clearer than it was at Formnext. INDX is not the cheapest way to add color to a Prusa printer, and the roughly $250 price jump from initial estimates is a legitimate gripe for early backers. But as an upgrade path priced at $749 to $999 rather than a new-printer purchase near $2,400, and with a waste profile that Prusa's own numbers suggest is dramatically better than purge-based alternatives, it's shaping up as a serious, production-grade — and substantially cheaper — answer to Bambu's H2C, provided the five-to-six-hour install and the still-maturing firmware hold up once it reaches more workshops than Bondtech's early-access list.
