mdf:

 

Understand where you're coming from, but I've also got sympathy for Bambu's position. For waste minimisation, it's awesome that they drove the shift to reusable spools and offer refill-only options. You get (I think?) one free spool with the printer and another 4 (5?) with an AMS, so plenty to get started. $25 for another spool isn't peanuts, but it will definitely do way more than 5 refills and so will easily pay for itself. And then they even open sourced the model so you can print your own...

 

I suspect that the novel and exotic filament is probably mainly targeted at enthusiasts who alread have spools; selling a spool-in option could make those SKUs pretty slow to move and end up with waste. That said, offering a "add a spool for (say) another $10" sales option could reduce the SKUs even further.

 

I've seen generic reusable spools on the usual marketplaces for about half the price of genuine Bambu ones. Haven't tried these myself since I'm happy with the Bambu ones I have. But might be worthwhile investigating if you're in a bit of an edge usage scenario. 

 

What are you doing for a dry box to keep all those open spools as dry as possible?

 

@mdf I agree that making the spools reusable is a good move, as is the refill-only option. But having filaments that you can't purchase on a spool is annoying, and I'm unlikely to change my view on that.

The ones I'm talking about aren't exotic filaments; it's just some new colours they added to their PLA Matte range at the beginning of the year. I don't think I'm an edge case, I probably just complain more!

Sure a $25 spool will last more than 5 refills, but you can't use it for 5 different filaments at once! And I'm not paying $25 for a spool that most of the time is included for only $5 (for Basic and Matte PLA it's $35 for refill, $40 spool included) and also isn't even available locally so would have to pay additional shipping.

I have two 50L gasketed (so should be airtight) storage bins with a good amount of indicating (orange to green) desiccant in a mesh bag in each. Have a Z-Wave humidity sensor in one of them that consistently reads around 9% (am working on the assumption the other will be about the same as long as the desiccant remains orange).

Printed a desiccant kit for AMS to hold more than the standard little trays, so AMS consistently reports 5% humidity or less.