...Which it should have friggin' come with from the start. I still have no idea what Qidi was smoking providing a plate textured the same on both sides, especially when their previous printers already came with a dual-sided plate. At least now I can make parts that are actually flat on the bottom.
The textured plate was kind of cool for doing large parts with visible flat surfaces, like box lids. But it kind of sucks for doing small mechanical parts.
Kapton sheet optional, but I'd rather replace a 30 cent piece of tape rather than a $48 build plate due to the surface wearing out over time. The massive sheets I used for my old printer (and trimmed down) are almost big enough for the X-Max 3's plate. I think you'd have to try quite hard to print in the last 10mm around the edges anyhow.
I will say this about the whizz-bang side firing build plate fan in these new 3rd gen Qidi printers... It's completely unnecessary, at least with regular PLA. Less than useless. It cools the plate too much, to the point that it can't maintain its surface temperature and your parts will curl and lift off the plate on the side where the fan is. I just disabled it in the slicer. Even printing at pretty high speed -- IIRC the default for regular PLA is 250 mm/sec -- I haven't found any need for the extra cooling, not even with bridges and stuff. Maybe it's more useful when you're printing with Qidi's "Rapido" PLA, which I'm sure as hell not paying for.
Also.
Heh heh heh.
You say you're not going to pay for Qidi's Rapido PLA, but man is it a solid and consistent filament. I've tried Elegoo's Rapid PLA+ and PolyMatter's PolyTerra (which, in fairness, is a very different filament) and neither holds a candle to the Qidi Rapido PLA. Prints end up surprisingly smooth, and I've had very few failures. The PolyTerra is matte, so the end result's layer lines are almost unnoticeable, but has to be printed SO MUCH SLOWER, and has to be printed cooler or it curls AND sticks too much to the build plate. The Elegoo Rapid PLA and Rapid PLA+ are okay, but just not as smooth as either of the other two.
While Qidi's Rapido PLA is expensive for one spool, they have surprisingly steep discounts when you buy more, and the price can easily come down to about $20/kg as a result. If I wasn't trying to only use recycled filament, I'd probably only print with the Rapido PLA since it took no dialing in. It just worked. Meanwhile, I've had to tune parameters for the others and have thrown away a fair amount of plastic as a result. I'd love if Qidi sold a recycled filament that could be printed even half as fast as the Rapido PLA, I'd probably be all over it.