Who needs to choose when a print starts?
Anyone whose printer cannot just run whenever it likes. People who pay less for electricity at night than in the evening. People whose printer stands in a bedroom, a home office or a classroom that is occupied during the day. Print farms that want the first jobs of the day finished before the first person walks in. Shared machines in labs and makerspaces, where your turn is booked for Thursday night. If "start it now" is the wrong answer for you, this is the feature.
Four reasons to set a start time
Scheduling is not really about the calendar. It is about whatever makes right now the wrong moment - the electricity bill, the room, the shift, or the person who has to be there when it finishes.
What running overnight actually saves you
The heated bed and hotend use most of a printer's power, and a long print keeps them hot for hours. If your electricity is cheaper at night, the same print can cost noticeably less just for running between midnight and 6am instead of in the evening - and that difference costs you nothing but the start time. What has stopped people taking it is that the start time is the one thing a slicer will not let you set, so the print gets started whenever you happen to be standing at the machine, which is exactly the expensive hour.
With Schedule Print you pick the hour your electricity is cheapest and forget about it. The print is booked as soon as you finish slicing and becomes eligible at that hour; it starts on the next server pass if the printer is ready. One thing to be clear about: the printer has to be powered and connected when the start is attempted. This is a scheduler, not a power switch.
How to schedule a 3D print in SimplyPrint
Pick your file the way you always do. In the Start print window, tick Schedule for later and the time controls appear. Choose an exact moment in the date-and-time picker, or use one of the three quick choices underneath - 1 hour, 4 hours or Tomorrow. Choose Start at to use that time directly, or Finish by to have SimplyPrint derive a start time from the estimated duration.
The submit button changes from starting the print to Schedule print, so there is no ambiguity about what is about to happen, and anything from one minute to seven days ahead is accepted. From the print queue, "Start on printer(s)" opens the printer picker, and its confirm button carries a Schedule for later option beside it. (With a single printer and no multi-material system the queue starts straight away without that picker, so schedule those jobs from the printer's own Start print window instead.) It is in the REST API too - a schedule_for field on the create-job call, plus a reschedule endpoint - and on our hosted MCP server, so an ERP, a shop-floor script or an AI assistant can book a print and move it later without a person opening the panel.
Does my computer have to stay on? No - the schedule runs on the server
A scheduled print in SimplyPrint is held server-side and released by the existing Staggered Start queue runner, while composing with AutoPrint rather than depending on it. Close the tab. Shut the laptop. Leave the building, put your phone in a drawer, lose your internet connection at home. At the moment you chose, the job becomes eligible and starts on the next server pass if the printer is ready. The only thing that has to be reachable is the printer itself.
That is what separates it from the workarounds people are usually pointed at:
| Approach | What actually presses start | Re-time or cancel later? | Needs a machine left on? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dwell (G4) commands in your start G-code | The printer, once you have already started the job | No - the delay is baked into the sliced file, so changing it means re-slicing and re-uploading | No |
| A smart plug on a timer | Nothing. It powers the printer up; something still has to send the job | Only the power schedule, not the print | No |
| A PC left awake with a task scheduler | A script on your own computer | Yes, if you wrote it that way | Yes - the computer has to stay awake all night |
| A self-hosted single-printer plugin | The small computer attached to that one printer | Depends on the plugin | Yes - that host has to stay up |
| SimplyPrint Schedule Print | SimplyPrint's servers, once the scheduled job is eligible and the printer is ready | Yes - Change time, Start now or Cancel, from the panel, your phone or the API | No |
It works on printers whose firmware never got a start timer
People have been asking printer vendors for a scheduled start for years. "Schedule Print for Specific Time" has been open on BambuStudio's issue tracker since 2022 and a second delayed-start request was opened there in 2026; the Bambu Lab forum has carried the same request since 2024. In Prusa's firmware tracker somebody sketched almost exactly this interface - start in 15 minutes, or start at 09:45 - noting that Prusa Connect already does it and asking for the same thing offline.
That last one is the pattern worth noticing: where a vendor has shipped a scheduled start, it works on that vendor's own printers, through that vendor's own cloud. Schedule Print works regardless of what any vendor has built, and regardless of whose printer it is. It lives in the SimplyPrint platform, above the firmware, so it behaves the same on 600+ printer models across 130+ brands - including every machine whose own firmware has no concept of a start time, and across a mixed fleet where no two printers run the same firmware.
The printer is held for you from the moment you schedule
A reservation, not a reminder
Scheduling a print does not leave a note for later - it takes the printer off the table straight away. The machine enters a pending state and its card in the printers list reads Starts Tomorrow, 13:30 instead of idle, so nobody on your team starts something else on it and no automation claims it either.
That reservation is the whole reason a scheduled print is worth trusting. A timer that just tries to start something at 3am might work; holding the printer from the moment you book it is what makes it reliable. It is also what makes an evening of planning stick on a fleet: you can walk a row of printers at 6pm, line up tomorrow morning's first jobs on each one, and know nothing will slide into those slots overnight.
In our 2026 print-farm survey, one 140-printer farm, 3DFY Labs, put SimplyPrint's overall effect at "We can manage approx. 2x the printers with the same number of staff" (capacity question, n=14).
Everything waiting to start, and how to change it
Moving a print by an hour needs no re-slicing and no re-upload - the time is a property of the booking, not the file.
1. The Scheduled print widget on the printer
The printer's control panel gets its own widget: when it starts, and Change time, Start now and Cancel.
2. Everything booked, in one table
Print history grows a Waiting to start table: every booked print, which printer, and when. One glance answers "what happens tonight?".
3. Release or drop a job from the row itself
Each scheduled row carries Change time, Start now and Cancel, so you can move, release or drop a whole evening's bookings from one table.
What happens if the printer is offline at 3am?
Printers get unplugged, routers reboot, and a machine that was fine at 11pm is not always fine at 3am. What happens at the scheduled moment depends on why the printer was not ready, and the two cases behave differently.
If SimplyPrint already knows the printer is offline, the booking becomes an ordinary pending print and waits for the printer to reconnect. If the printer still looked ready when the start was issued but disappeared during that attempt, SimplyPrint gives up after a few minutes, cancels the pending job and hands the printer back rather than leaving it wedged.
If the printer is simply busy, paused or in an error state, the booking is not thrown away. It stays on that printer as an ordinary pending print with no fixed time, and starts once the printer is free again - which can be a good deal later than the hour you picked. So check what is on the bed before scheduling onto a machine that may still be running something, and cancel the booking from the printer's widget if you no longer want it.
A plan change is handled deliberately too. If an account drops below Pro while prints are still waiting for their time, those prints are cancelled, rather than a print starting on an account that is no longer entitled to it. Prints already released are unaffected.
Schedule Print, Staggered Start, AutoPrint: which one do you need?
These four get confused constantly, because they all end with a printer starting. They answer different questions, and most accounts end up with more than one.
| Feature | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Print queue | What gets printed next, and on which compatible printer. |
| Schedule Print | When one specific print is allowed to begin. |
| Staggered Start | In what order prints begin once capacity frees up, so twenty printers do not all preheat at once and trip a breaker. |
| AutoPrint | Whether printing continues across jobs without a person - clearing the bed and picking up the next item. |
Check the plans separately, because they differ: Schedule Print is included on Pro and up. Staggered Start is on the Print Farm, School and Enterprise plans. You do not need both to use either - here is how Staggered Start works.
Decide who is allowed to hold a printer overnight
Being able to start a print and being able to reserve a printer until 3am are not the same authority, and on a shared machine they should not be the same checkbox. Can schedule prints is its own per-rank permission, under Printing in the basics right beside Can print, and its checkbox only appears for ranks that already have Can print. Existing base roles that can print keep scheduling access when the feature is introduced; workgroups stay opt-in, and an admin can adjust either. Account owners and full-access users always have it. Ranks arrive with the Print Farm plan and up - on Pro every user in the account can schedule, because there are no ranks to split.
Re-timing is protected too. Changing or cancelling someone else's scheduled print additionally needs the permission to cancel other people's prints, so a colleague's 4am job cannot be quietly moved by accident.
That split is what makes shared machines workable. In a university lab or a makerspace, a booked slot becomes a real reservation instead of a sign-up sheet: every student can start a print during the session, while the lab manager decides which ranks may hold a machine overnight - granted per rank rather than per person, so it survives the intake in September. The same split is useful in a farm, where operators start prints all day and only shift leads take a machine out of circulation until 5am.
Plan access: what do I need to schedule prints?
Schedule Print is included on the Pro, Print Farm, School and Enterprise plans. There is no add-on to buy, no per-printer licence, no per-schedule fee and no setup fee - Pro is the cheapest plan that unlocks it, and it applies to every printer in the account. There is no cap on how many prints you can have booked; each printer holds one scheduled print at a time, because the booking reserves the machine.
| Feature / Limit | Free | Basic | Pro | Print Farm | Enterprise | School | Cloud Slicer | Filament Manager |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Schedule Print
Book a print from one minute to seven days ahead, on any printer in the account, with the printer reserved until it runs.
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