The story so far.
The prototype years
I grew up watching my parents fight a printer every Sunday afternoon. Twenty years later, my friends in college were fighting the same fight with the same printers, just with newer phones. The printer hadn't changed. The phone had. The frustration was identical.
I started Print Ease in a dorm room at the University of Arkansas in 2024 with a soldering iron, a $4 microcontroller, and a stubborn refusal to believe this had to be so hard.
The first prototype was an ESP32, a USB-to-serial adapter, and three hundred lines of bad C code that turned my roommate's HP into something my iPhone could find. It worked. Then we made it work better. Then we made it work for printers that weren't HPs. Then for printers that didn't have Wi-Fi at all.
The decision to ship
By late 2025 we had a working prototype that I and a handful of close friends used every day. I had two choices: write it up as a class project and move on, or treat it as the start of something. I chose the second because the printers were not going to fix themselves, and because there was a specific kind of company I wanted to build — one that respected the people who bought its product, that didn't bury its lock-in in fine print, that didn't disappear when the cap table got difficult.
I moved to Austin, signed the first lease for a real office, and got serious about manufacturing.
The first shipment
We shipped the first hundred units to friendly beta users in February 2026. We shipped the public Pro and Lite in late April. The Fleet pilot opened to MSPs in May.
We are a small team. We answer our own support tickets. We are profitable on every Pro unit we sell, near-break-even on Lite, and growing Fleet at the speed our infrastructure will allow. We do not have venture capital pressure to grow at any cost. We do have a written commitment to our customers that their hardware will outlive our company if we fail, and that pressure is more sobering than any board meeting.
This is just the beginning. The roadmap below is what comes next.