There is a model on every free 3D print site of a gorgeous faceted planter with a solid bottom. Thousands of people have printed it. It has hundreds of glowing comments. Not one of those comments is from a plant.
I’m Caryn. Jill handles the printers and I handle the boxes, which means I’m the one at the kitchen table reading the emails when something goes wrong six weeks after it ships. In 2019 we got one about a string of pearls that had gone to mush in a pot we’d sold with a sealed base, back when we were still printing other people’s designs and hadn’t thought it through. We redrew the entire catalog that winter. Every pot we’ve made since has a hole in the bottom, and this post is the long version of why.
Why so many printed planters don’t have one
It isn’t laziness, exactly. It’s that most planter models are drawn by people who are designing a shape.
A sealed bottom prints cleanly. It gives the slicer a nice flat first layer with maximum surface contact on the build plate, which means fewer failed prints and no warping at the corners. Add a hole and you’ve introduced a small unsupported edge that some printers handle badly. So the model gets published solid, someone downloads it, someone else sells it on a marketplace, and the sealed version propagates for years without anybody in the chain putting soil in one and waiting three weeks.
The other reason is that a hole makes fulfilment harder for a seller. Water gets out. Water on a shelf means a saucer, and a saucer means another SKU. Easier to sell a cup.
A sealed plastic pot is worse than a sealed ceramic one
Here’s the part specific to printed pots, and it’s the reason this question deserves its own answer rather than a paragraph inside a general drainage article.
Unglazed terracotta is porous. Even with no hole, some moisture moves out through the clay walls and evaporates. It’s not enough to save a plant, but it buys time. PLA is not porous at all. Nothing leaves a sealed printed pot except by evaporating off the top inch of soil, and the top inch is exactly the part that isn’t the problem.
So water collects at the bottom in a saturated zone, roots sitting in it lose access to oxygen, and rot moves upward while the plant still looks fine. In a printed pot that zone lasts longer than it would in almost any other container you could have chosen. The material itself isn’t the culprit, and we went through that in detail in our post on whether PLA is safe for plants. The geometry is.
Succulents die of this fastest, which is why we wrote a separate piece on whether succulents need drainage and what the gravel-layer myth actually does. Short version: gravel doesn’t help. It never helped.
Fixing a printed pot you already own
You have three real options, in the order I’d try them.
- Use it as a cover pot. Leave the plant in its nursery pot, drop the nursery pot inside, lift it out at the sink to water, and tip out anything that pools. Zero tools, zero risk, works immediately. This is what I do with about half the pots in my house.
- Drill it. A 1/4-inch bit, the slowest speed your drill has, and light pressure from the outside in with the pot supported on a scrap board. PLA drills easily. Too fast and the bit grabs and cracks the wall, so go slow and let the flutes clear. Clean the edge with a fingernail afterward.
- Repurpose it. Pens, hair ties, the small tools on a potting bench. Not every planter has to hold a plant, and a sealed one is a perfectly good desk cup.
What I would not do is melt a hole through it with a soldering iron, which you will see recommended in forum threads. It works. It also produces hot plastic fumes in your kitchen, and PLA softens around 140°F so the surrounding wall deforms into a puckered mess on the way. We have tried it. It looked awful and I opened every window in the house.
Printing your own? Change two things in the model
If you’re running your own machine, you don’t need a new model. You need a boolean and a small design decision.
First, subtract a cylinder from the base. One hole in the center at 8 to 10mm is plenty for a 3 or 4-inch pot. Two or three smaller holes drain about as well and print more reliably, because each one leaves a shorter unsupported span. Set the first layer a touch slower and you won’t get droop at the edge.
Second, add feet or a recessed rim so the base sits a few millimetres off the surface. A hole that’s pressed flat against a desk drains into surface tension and then sits there, which is a subtler version of the same problem. Three small feet, or a lip around the underside, and water actually leaves.
Wall thickness matters more once there’s a hole, since you’ve removed some of the base’s stiffness. We run ours thicker than a decorative print needs, which is part of why a pot takes about four hours on the machine instead of two.
Buying a planter with a drainage hole without getting burned
Listings lie by omission more than they lie outright. Things worth checking before you pay:
- A photo of the underside. If the seller shows you eight angles and none of them is the bottom, that’s the answer.
- The phrase “drainage hole,” not “drainage-friendly design” or “designed with drainage in mind.” Those mean no.
- Whether it’s a pot you fill with soil or a shell that takes a nursery pot. Both are fine. The second is easier to live with and much easier to repot.
- What size nursery pot it fits, stated in inches. “Small” is not a measurement.
Every planter in our shop has a drainage hole, because of a string of pearls in 2019 and a winter spent redrawing files. That’s not a policy somebody wrote in a brand document. It’s a scar.
And if the question underneath your question is really about the plastic rather than the hole, start with our plain-English answer on whether PLA is toxic. Most people asking about printed pots are asking about the wrong thing. The material is boring. The bottom of the pot is where the plants die.