Printago for Education: Classwork, Student Printing, and Free Student Access

A school 3D printing lab usually runs on three disconnected things: a lesson document somewhere, a folder of model files somewhere else, and a line of students waiting for someone to slice and start their prints. Instructors spend class time doing file triage. IT fields requests for yet another account system. Students learn to print on the school's machines, then go home to their own printer with a completely different toolset.

Printago for Education puts the lesson, the parts, and the printers in one place. Once students leave the classroom, the same software goes home with them.

The Problem Schools Actually Have

The printers are rarely the hard part. The hard part is everything around them:

• Getting the right file to the right student. Lessons live in one tool and models in another, and students print the wrong revision.
• Knowing whose job is whose. A queue full of "bracket_v3.3mf" doesn't tell you which of 28 students queued it.
• Keeping students productive without handing over the keys. Students should be able to print. They shouldn't be able to reorder the queue, change printer settings, or walk off with part files.
• What happens after the course ends. Students who get hooked on 3D printing buy their own machines, and the tools they learned in class usually don't come with them.

What Printago Education Does

Printago's education features are built around the Classwork add-on, which is free. Turn it on from the Addons page and a Classwork section appears in the sidebar under Education.

For teachers

Every classwork item is a lesson that students can act on:

• Rich-text lessons. Write in the editor, or paste from Google Docs or Word and keep the formatting: headings, lists, quotes, code blocks, and links.
• Reference links to videos, websites, and documentation.
• Parts to print. Attach parts from your Printago library, with an optional note such as "print at 0.2mm". Students open and print each part right inside Printago, and teachers control whether they can download or edit the underlying part files and 3MF projects.
• File attachments. Worksheets and images (TXT, MD, DOCX, JPG, PNG, up to 25 MB each).
• Folders. Organize by class or unit, for example "Period 3 - Engineering". Students see the same tree, trimmed to what's assigned to them.
• Draft and published. Items start as drafts, and students never see a draft even when it's assigned. Publish when ready, and unpublish any time without losing assignments.
• Assign to students, one item at a time or in bulk across many items. Preview as Student shows exactly what a student will see before you publish.

For students

Students get the Student role, and with it a focused reader: assigned lessons on the left, the selected lesson on the right. From a lesson they can open a part, slice it, and add it to the teacher's print queue like any other job.

The guardrails are built into the role. Students can cancel or remove only their own jobs. They can't reorder the queue, control printers, change settings, or download part files. For classes that should look but not print, use the Viewer role instead.

For the lab

Every job in the Print Queue shows who queued it. Student jobs carry the student's email, so a class's jobs are easy to tell apart at a glance.

How Accounts Fit Together

Printago's account model for schools stays simple:

• Every lab is a Printago account. Each separate lab or group of printers has its own account, run by the teachers who teach there, with an optional lab admin.
• Labs join your school. Your school's IT Admin invites each lab to join and becomes an admin of every lab that does, so IT can help run a lab on a teacher's behalf. The school level is coming soon.
• Students join labs, not the school. Students create their own Printago accounts and join each lab they take part in, where they see its printers, parts, and classwork. The school never manages students' own accounts.

Free Printago for Students, Including Commercial Features

This is the part we think matters most.

If your school pays for Printago, your verified students get free, full access to Printago while they're enrolled.

That access isn't limited to the school lab. Students can connect their own printers to Printago and run them with the same platform they use in class, alongside the school's printers. They don't need a second tool, a personal subscription, or a new workflow to learn when they get home.

For schools, that turns a lab tool into a benefit every enrolled student carries with them. For students, it removes the cost step between "I learned this in class" and "I'm running my own printers." And because Printago never charges per printer, a student's growing home setup never runs into a printer cap.

Students at any school

Students whose school doesn't use Printago get a strong offer too. Verify your student status and get 3 months of Printago's Commercial plan free, then 30% off. Keep the discount by re-verifying twice a year, right from the app.

Student verification in Account settings is rolling out soon. Until then, email support@printago.io or message us on Discord and we'll apply the student discount to your account.

How This Compares to SimplyPrint

SimplyPrint is the most established name in education 3D printing, and its School plan is a capable classroom platform. Here is how the two approaches differ, based on SimplyPrint's public pricing and help pages as of September 2026:

	Printago	SimplyPrint
Using the school's printers	Students join each lab's Printago account with their own accounts	Students are users on the school's School plan, which the school pays for (500 users included)
Students running their own printers	Free, full access while their school pays for Printago. At any other school: 3 months of the Commercial plan free, then 30% off with student verification	Students pay for a personal Basic or Pro plan at 40% off (60% off if their school pays for SimplyPrint), renewable yearly for up to 5 years
Lessons tied to parts	Classwork: lessons, links, files, and parts with Open & print	Academy: slide courses with videos and quizzes, custom courses on the School plan
Labs and teachers	Each lab is a Printago account run by its teachers, and the school's IT Admin is an admin of every lab that joins (coming soon)	Teachers are invited individually and flagged as teachers
Single sign-on	Yes, set up for any school that needs it	Yes, on the School plan
Printer pricing	Printago never charges per printer	School plan: $40/month with 2 printers included, extra printers $20/month each

The biggest difference is what happens outside the lab. On SimplyPrint, a student who wants to run their own printers pays for a personal subscription, with a discount. On Printago, that student's access is free while they're enrolled at a Printago school, and students anywhere else start with 3 free months of the Commercial plan.

Built for School IT

• Single sign-on. Printago sets up SSO with your school's identity provider for any school that needs it, so students and staff sign in with the accounts they already have.
• Usage you can charge back (coming soon). Auditable printer time and material usage per student, so departments can see who used what and handle chargebacks without spreadsheets.
• Per-student limits (coming soon). Set how much and how often each student can use the printers.

Getting Started

1. Create a Printago account for each lab and connect its printers. Printago supports hundreds of printer models across more than 50 brands, and you can connect as many printers as you own.
2. Enable Classwork from the Addons page.
3. Invite the other teachers who run each lab, and add a lab admin if the lab has one.
4. Invite students from Users and give them the Student role.
5. Write your first lesson, attach the parts to print, assign it, and publish.
6. Tell students about their free Printago access so they can bring their own printers along.

Need a quote or a proposal with setup and support services? Reach out to sales@printago.io for a custom quote for your institution.

Read the Classwork documentation for the full walkthrough, see how Printago fits education labs, or create a free Printago account to try it with your own printers today.