So I really love Octoprint Anywhere. It solves some monitoring issues with my firewall at work and keeps everything very well organized and together. I know I'm a bit odd but I have 5 printers now (am very much still a hobbyist though. I am NOT running a business) and would love to have monitoring for all of them like what Octoprint Anywhere offers, but my problem is with their pricing structure. 1 printer is free (awesome) and you pay $5/month for each additional printer, It's not so bad when you have two. Three is where it starts getting expensive. I am currently configured for three and that comes to $120/year, just for monitoring.
My question, is there an equivalent alternative that's cheaper at a higher scale?
Does anyone know this this plugin maker and can talk them into an all you can eat price or maybe buckets? I would love to pay something like 1-3 printers $5/month 4-6 printers $10/month etc. I don't mind paying, but I can't see expanding my two other printers to use this service at these prices. I am also considering buying another printer so you can see where my hesitation lies. (And when I say buying another printer I'm talking an Ender 3 not an Ultimaker, I already spend too much money on this hobby as it is).
This potentially might not work for you as after reading it seems that for the camera to work you have to be able to have direct access to the feed (fully qualified url).
Never used any of those plugins and don't have 5 printers (yet ), but my free and independent from 3rd party way of watching/controlling my printer from anywhere is OpenVPN into my home network and accessing regular Octoprint web interface via local IP address.
And yet, I still wear myself out with all sorts of hobbies. It's not that I'm cheap; if some vendor or service provider is overcharging me for something I have been known to expend way more hours than I should to just "roll my own" solution. A proprietary APC serial monitoring cable which costs $39.99? You've got to be kidding me. You know I'm going to spend way more than that in hours to make my own cable. But it's the principle of it. And it sounds like you're in the same boat with Anywhere.
I use google chrome remote desk top and remote into my home computer. From there I just pull up Octoprint on the browser. It’s free and it works great on my iPhone.
I use openvpn on a rented vps (a cheap one for ~5€ / month is enough for this) to connect remotely to the raspberry pi. It works really well combined with octoremote on phones and of course the webinterface. I don't know which extra functions octoprint anywhere has, but this is an easy way to access octoprint without opening up your network. You could also use the vpn, which is included in many home routers for this. Of course you can use as many printers as you want with no additional cost
), but my free and independent from 3rd party way of watching/controlling my printer from anywhere is OpenVPN into my home network and accessing regular Octoprint web interface via local IP address.