Meet 'Open Printer': The DRM-Free Inkjet Built to Never Become E-Waste

Most of the printer industry is built around locking you to one brand of cartridge. One small startup is building the opposite, on purpose, in the open.

What Open Printer actually is

Open Printer is an open-source, repairable inkjet printer from Paris-based startup Open Tools, first revealed in 2025. On 29 June 2026 the team announced a working prototype capable of printing in both black and colour, switching between cut sheets and paper rolls, and cutting paper on demand using a built-in cutter.

How it's built

The printer is built around a Raspberry Pi Zero W paired with an STM32 microcontroller that manages the cartridge board, supporting 600 dpi monochrome and 1,200 dpi colour printing. Rather than designing a proprietary cartridge system, Open Printer reuses genuine HP cartridge modules (HP 302 in Europe, HP 63 in the US), which owners can refill themselves whenever they choose.

No DRM, no proprietary drivers

The whole point of the project is what it deliberately leaves out: no proprietary print drivers, and no cartridge DRM locking the printer to a single ink supplier. All of the design files, electronics, mechanical drawings, firmware code and bill of materials are being released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.

Where it stands right now

Open Printer has been nominated for French Design Awards in the Production and Teaching & Learning categories, and a crowdfunding campaign launched on Crowd Supply in late 2025. As of mid-2026, there's still no confirmed retail price, print speed spec, or shipping date, this remains a prototype-stage project rather than a shipping product.

Why it's worth watching even if you never buy one

Whether or not Open Printer ever reaches full retail production, it's a useful data point: there's real appetite, even among hobbyists and makers building their own hardware, for printers that don't lock owners into one cartridge supplier via firmware. That's the same underlying frustration that drives most people toward compatible cartridges on the printer they already own, just approached from the hardware side instead of the consumables side.