Prusa Research confirmed in a July 3, 2026 blog post that Bondtech has begun shipping Founder's Edition units of INDX, the toolchanger-based multi-material upgrade for the CORE One and CORE One+ platform, with early adopters already running production hardware. The update marks the first real-world confirmation that INDX — a project that has spent months moving from prototype to preorder to shipping dock — is now in the hands of customers rather than just on a trade-show table.
For a company that built its reputation on single-nozzle reliability, INDX represents a genuine architectural departure. Rather than pushing multiple filaments through one hotend and dumping the purged transition material — the approach used by AMS-style systems from other manufacturers — INDX uses a toolchanger design developed by Bondtech, Prusa's longtime extruder partner. Each material gets its own tool head, which docks and undocks from the print carriage as the job calls for it. That structural difference is the whole story behind the waste numbers Prusa is now willing to publish.
What the Waste Numbers Actually Mean
According to Prusa's own testing, INDX produces roughly 30 times less waste than competing multi-color solutions on the model used for comparison, with priming pellets — the small blobs of plastic purged when a tool switches material — averaging just 0.013 to 0.015 grams each. On an AMS-style system, a single color change can waste a purge tower segment weighing several grams; multiply that across a print with dozens of color transitions and the difference between systems compounds quickly. Because each INDX tool head keeps its own primed nozzle rather than flushing a shared one, color swaps become closer to a mechanical tool change than a full material purge.
Independent coverage from Fabbaloo corroborates the underlying architecture, describing INDX as a Bondtech-developed toolchanger system for the CORE One/+ platform that enables up to eight colors in a single print job while drastically cutting purge waste relative to AMS-style setups. That eight-color ceiling is not arbitrary — Prusa's supported configuration is an 8-tool CMYKW+RGB arrangement, pairing cyan, magenta, yellow, key (black), and white with red, green, and blue, giving makers a genuinely broad palette without needing to swap spools mid-print or rely on color-mixing extrusion.
Installation and Timeline
Prusa says a typical INDX installation takes about five to six hours, positioning it as a substantial but weekend-manageable upgrade rather than a factory-only modification. That install window covers mounting the toolchanger hardware, wiring the additional tool heads, and running through calibration — a process All3DP's reporting notes has been refined with faster calibration technology since INDX was first previewed at Formnext, alongside the material savings at nozzle priming that are now central to Prusa's pitch.
Shipping itself is being staged in two tiers. The Founder's Edition — effectively the early-access batch for customers who committed first — is the version now leaving Bondtech's production line and landing with early adopters. The standard INDX Conversion Kit, aimed at the broader CORE One/+ install base, is scheduled to begin leaving the factory by the end of July 2026, with Prusa targeting full shipment of the entire first batch by the end of August. That's a meaningful gap between "shipping has started" and "everyone who ordered has one in hand," and it's worth factoring into expectations if you placed an order expecting a mid-summer delivery.
Software is trailing hardware only partially at this point. Prusa's July update confirms firmware 6.6.1 — the release that underpins multi-tool operation — has already shipped, while four additional print profiles tuned specifically for multi-tool workflows are still coming, per Prusa's own timeline. The company is also developing a larger waste-bin option — an acknowledgment that even at dramatically reduced per-swap waste, a printer running eight tools through long multi-color jobs will still need somewhere for those pellets to go, and the standard bin capacity may not suit every print length.
What It Means for Makers
For makers who have avoided multi-material printing specifically because of the waste and cost of purge towers, INDX is the first serious signal that Prusa is willing to compete directly with AMS-style ecosystems on efficiency rather than just catching up on feature parity. A 30x reduction in waste — even allowing for the fact that Prusa's own comparison is based on a specific tested model rather than an exhaustive independent benchmark — is a large enough gap that it should meaningfully change the calculus on filament cost for anyone running frequent color changes. Pellets averaging hundredths of a gram, repeated across a print with heavy tool switching, add up to a fraction of the plastic an AMS purge tower would consume.
The 8-tool CMYKW+RGB configuration also matters for a specific audience: makers doing color-accurate work, whether that's replicating printed graphics, matching brand colors, or producing multi-tone models where subtractive color mixing via a shared nozzle has never been precise enough. A dedicated tool per color sidesteps the blending and ooze problems that plague single-nozzle multi-material setups.
Price is part of this calculation too. Since orders opened, the INDX conversion kit has been sold in 4-nozzle and 8-nozzle configurations, layered on top of the CORE One/+ base printer — putting a fully configured 8-tool system in the same general price band as established multi-material competitors like Bambu Lab's H2C, while undercutting it modestly at the top end. A 4-tool entry point, meanwhile, lands close to lower-tier toolchanger rivals like Snapmaker's U1, giving Prusa a foothold at both ends of the market rather than only the high end. For makers weighing INDX against those alternatives, the purge-waste difference is likely to matter as much as the sticker price, since filament savings compound with every color-heavy print run.
The trade-offs are the ones you'd expect from any toolchanger system in its first shipping wave: five to six hours of install labor, a print-profile library that's still catching up even though the underlying firmware has shipped, and a waste-bin capacity question still being worked out for longer jobs. None of that is disqualifying, but it does mean early Founder's Edition owners are functioning as the real-world test bed while Prusa rounds out the software side. If you ordered the standard Conversion Kit, the realistic expectation is a shipment window stretching from late July into late August — plan around that rather than around the Founder's Edition timeline you're seeing reported this week.
