Printr turns every thermal label printer in your business into an API
call. Send a job from your software, watch it print, and know exactly
why when it doesn't.
Then it is the only thing anyone can talk about. An order cannot go
out without a label, and a printer whose state nobody can see turns
into someone walking across a warehouse to go and look at it.
Most print setups are honest about very little. The queue says idle
whether or not there is a printer on the end of it. A job that
vanishes leaves nothing behind to explain where it went. And the
fix for a dropped connection — send it again — is the same action
that prints two shipping labels for one parcel.
Printr was built the other way round: check the hardware rather than
the queue, record every transition, and make sending twice safe by
design. What you get is not faster printing. It is printing you can
answer questions about.
Platform
Everything printing should have told you.
Four things Printr does that a print queue does not.
01
Know the printer is there
Every other system asks the print queue how the printer is doing. The queue is not the printer.
Unplug a label printer and most systems will still cheerfully report it as ready, because they are reading the queue rather than the machine. Printr checks the printer itself, every 45 seconds, and tells you the moment something changes.
Checked again at the moment of printing
"We cannot reach it" kept separate from "it is offline"
A plain yes or no on whether each printer can print
02
Nothing to open on the firewall
The Mac in your warehouse reaches out to Printr. Printr never reaches in.
A small app runs on a Mac at each site and calls out to Printr, the same way a browser does. No fixed IP address, no ports to open, no VPN, and no conversation with anyone's IT department. If the connection drops it keeps checking for work until it comes back.
Nothing to open on the firewall
Keeps checking for work if the connection drops
A blip costs you seconds, never a label
03
One label, once
A network blip in the middle of a request should not cost you a second shipping label.
Tag a job with your own order reference and sending it twice still prints once — even if two retries land at the same instant. Printr only counts a label as done once it has actually gone to the printer, so a genuine failure can still be sent again.
Send the same job twice, get one label
Protected at both ends, not just ours
Old jobs expire instead of printing hours later
04
Answer "did it print?" properly
There is a real difference between a job that never reached the building and one that reached the printer and failed.
Every step a job takes is recorded and timestamped, from the moment you send it to the moment the label comes out. When something goes wrong you get a specific reason — not "failed" — and Printr tells you whether it is worth trying again.
A full history behind every label
A specific reason when something fails
Retry from the dashboard in one click
Developers
One POST. One label.
A REST API with bearer tokens, idempotency keys and pagination that
works the way you already expect. No SDK to adopt, no print server
to babysit.
A job is in exactly one of these, and the four terminal ones never
change again. Every transition is timestamped and attributed to
either the server or the agent that reported it.
Keep label layouts on the server, versioned immutably, and send
data rather than markup. Interpolated values are stripped of the
control characters that would otherwise let a customer's name
rewrite the label — so a surname with a caret in it is a
surname, not a command.
Raw, when you want raw
Send your own ZPL or TSPL2 straight through. Printr checks it is
well formed first — an unterminated label would otherwise leave a
printer waiting forever for the rest of it, which looks exactly
like a job that vanished.
Every tier carries more labels than the equivalent elsewhere, which is where the saving really lands: on Standard you are paying roughly half as much for each label you print.
No per-user fees
Put the whole floor on the dashboard. Teams keep each site seeing only its own printers, at no extra cost.
No surprise overage
Go over and we get in touch — we do not quietly bill you by the thousand and explain afterwards.
All prices exclude VAT. Every plan includes the full API, templates,
teams and complete job history.
FAQ
Questions worth asking.
Which printers work with Printr?
Thermal label printers from Zebra, TSC, Xprinter and compatible makes, either on your network or plugged into the Mac. We test against real printers rather than just the manufacturer's specification. Tell us the models you run and we will confirm before you commit to anything.
Do you support Dymo LabelWriters?
Printr finds LabelWriters and reports the exact model, so they show up in your inventory alongside everything else. Printing to them is on the roadmap. If Dymo is central to your operation, ask us where it stands and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth waiting.
What do I have to install?
One small app on a Mac at each site. No administrator password, no server to stand up, no firewall changes. It starts itself whenever the Mac does and keeps its credentials in the Mac's own secure storage. Setting it up is a code you copy from the dashboard — most sites are printing within the hour.
Which platforms does the agent run on?
macOS today, and one Mac can drive every printer at a site — network printers and anything plugged into it. The protocol was designed without any assumption about the operating system, so other platforms are a build rather than a redesign. If Windows is on your critical path, talk to us about timing.
How do I find out a job finished?
Ask Printr for the job and you get its current state plus everything that has happened to it, each step timestamped. Once a job has finished — printed, failed or cancelled — that is final, so there is nothing to keep watching.
Is my data separated from other customers?
Completely. Your printers, jobs and templates are only ever visible to your account, and that separation is enforced automatically rather than left to be remembered each time someone writes a query. Happy to walk your IT team through the detail if they would like it.
What happens when the Mac goes offline?
The agent sends a heartbeat every minute, and a sweep on the server marks a device offline when the heartbeat stops — going offline is the one thing an agent can never report about itself. Printer statuses are cleared at the same time, so a machine coming back does not briefly show readings from before it left. Jobs queued in the meantime expire rather than printing a backlog of stale labels at eight the next morning.
Can I change a label without redeploying my software?
Yes — that is what templates are for. Layouts live on the server and are versioned immutably, so a job records the exact version it rendered and a bad edit is one rollback rather than an incident. You can preview a render through the API without printing anything.
Find out what your printers are doing.
Set up a site in an afternoon. Tell us what you print and on what, and we
will tell you honestly whether Printr is the right fit.
