Printrbot

Printrbot gets pretty good reviews for being a cost-​effective tool that works pretty well. They are careful to mention that they do not review the cheaper models for service. And now I know why.
I ordered the Simple Metal, Assembled (1403). The tool actually worked when I plugged it in, though I never actually tried printing from the SD card. But within a day or so, it started having all sorts of fits. One was that it wrestled a bit with Cura, the open source program recommended to run it. Because printrbot doesn’t provide software and they can ostensibly run off of others’ software, they cannot help you run the printrbot from software they can’t control. But what was weird was that they one software the recommended should work, barely did. It got hung a bit. After another day, I was down hard with a connection error.
Another treat with printrbot is that you can never talk to anyone. They only have a staff moderated forum. In it, you’ll find a pile of people with connection problems, and these long list of things that the staff suggests you do regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. After establishing that you indeed read the directions, bought replacement cables at your own expense to debug a problem that they should have debugged, you then get the pleasure of being ignored, as the staff doesn’t have the requisite talent to actually help you. While it’s not unusual for the help desk to be populated with low skilled workers, what was unusual is that after being screened for doing all the standard fixes, that you don’t get bumped to someone who does know what they are doing. That won’t happen.
It’s also quite unbeliveable that you read a pile of people on this forum with very similar issues that are quite obviously in need of having this tool shipped back, but they will not offer to ship it back. After several months of these shenanigans, I finally got an offer that I purchase a new board, then ship mine back at my expense, and if they, at their sole discretion, decided that my board didn’t work, would refund me the cost of the board. Instead, I filed a complaint with the better business bureau. That seemed to help a bit. Eventually, they relented and sent me a shipping label for my board, which I needed to extract with no instructions. They indeed admitted the obvious, that I probably never had the ability to print from an SD card, and there was something wrong with my CPU. So they sent a new board with no instructions. Well that was interesting. I couldn’t believe the engineering that went into the installation of the board. Multiple, identical connectors with identical colored wires, some go in backwards and some go in frontwards!!. No instructions.
It’s pretty clear that these people have a manufacturing problem with their boards, and won’t deal with it. Their preferred method is to be obstinate until you go away, and figure if they don’t charge much, then you’ll go away easier. That’s a total pain in the neck, people, and you should stay away. It’s a roll of the dice with these guys, and if you come up with the lousy roll, you’ll get treated like dirt and your time wasted.