Exciting news for our MakerWorld community: We’re rolling out Commercial License Memberships!
Creators can now offer commercial print licenses directly on MakerWorld, making it easier than ever for makers to legally sell 3D printed models.
For creators: Earn from your designs with flexible licensing.
For makers: Find and buy commercial licenses hassle-free.
For everyone else: MakerWorld remains free for personal use.
Creators can boost their commercial membership sales by highlighting these memberships in their model descriptions. Here’s how:
Simply click the “membership” icon (located next to the “Boost” icon) when uploading or editing a model. This will allow users to access your membership offers directly from each of your model pages.
Click here to see the first creators who joined our commercial license program!
As always, we welcome all feedback, suggestions, and advice on this new feature and will continue optimizing it with the help of our dedicated community and forum members!
To ensure quality and prevent abuse, creators wanting to set up commercial memberships need at least 200 followers and 600 prints, with no rule violations in the past 90 days (except for incorrect reports).
I’m not going to predict anything but this sounds interesting.
Is it possible to write a license that only permits the in-person sale of physical 3D prints? I’ve had several users contact me about selling prints locally and would love to offer a commercial license that allows that. What I don’t want is low-quality Etsy and online sales where it becomes a race to the bottom to create and ship the cheapest version of my prints. Is it possible to offer a commercial license for only in-person sales so I can retain the commercial rights for online sales?
I’ll need to think about whether it’s worth putting all my eggs in the Bambu basket. I like having things separate, so I’m probably not going to join until there’s actual feedback and improvements so we know this isn’t just a “post and ghost” feature. I have known it was coming for a while, so I do have decently high expectations.
Thanks for creating another way for members of the community to support designers. I think this will allow creators with the resources to enhance their model designs and bring even more quality models to the site, while keeping models free to use for everyone. Cheers!
Been waiting for this since I joined! I guess we’ll see how many people actually follow through and subscribe - i’m so tired of playing wack-a-mole on etsy and ebay lol.
One suggestion for @Tanklet - Would it be possible to add the ability to re-arrange the order of the different tiers? Currently they’re ordered by the cheapest tier being the first one that is shown to the user, but it would be nice if we had the ability to customize it. I worry that people will click on the link, but the first thing that shows up is the “donation” tier, which might be a lot cheaper, and they assume that’s the commercial license. It would be nice if we could customize the order so this doesn’t happen.
Does anyone know how this works for remixes? Specifically, for accounts with models that include a mix of licenses, such as remixes that prohibit commercial sales (e.g.,CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, and CC BY-NC-ND), will those models be excluded from the “Commercial License Membership”?
I see this button available, which is fine for original designs:
I also tried searching through the member list of accounts with active commercial tiers to find a remix model but haven’t found one yet.
@MakerWorld i appreciate the implementation of commercial licensing subscription, it is great to keep track on which users are subscribed rather than going back and forth with users with different usernames on other subscription platforms.
the only thing i would want you to add is 3 tiers maximum should be changed to be unlimited, for the reason of making subscription per model.
an example, some users might need to subscribe to sell 1 model and pay a small amount, rather than paying a big amount for bunch of model whom the user only use the license to sell 1 only.
as well, i have models that i want to put for commercial use but has specific terms to use which might be different than any other in the same tier.
in different words, make it unlimited so that we can have to freedom to add subscription tiers by single item rather than bulk. (only remove the limit of up to 3 tiers).
Edit: i need to add, it will be more effective to track which specific model is being sold - so it does not conflict with my theft tracking mechanism.
edit: Looks like there isn’t but it’s a concern for the future, so still worth asking.
Will there be any Gating of models, or is it purely for the commercial rights
Will MakerWorld be going the thangs/printables route of allowing creators to lock some models behind a paywall (and the inevitable wave of previously free and popular models becoming paid) etc
oh no i hope not, otherwise the website will be done.
i bailed on 2 famous platforms just because some users are too greedy.
and i bet i can make the same model myself…yet this can create a similar useless uploads (just because i can upload a free version of the paid version).
and trust me paid files will never get you downloads…i did a trial on a trending model of mine on the purple website, when i put a price tag on it, gone 0 downloads per day, and when i removed the price tag it went trending again. yet the price tag was less than $1.
I used the new feature this morning to create membership plans. In general it works well, but there is what I consider to be one glaring problem - the fact that this UI now shows on EVERY one of my models.
While my license terms (based off Bambu’s template) are clear that the license only applies to certain models (for example, remixes are excluded, though that’s not the only case), I expect many users will see this UI and think it means a membership applies to the model they’re currently looking at. That’s going to cause issues where people sell prints they’re not allowed to sell - even worse if the designer doesn’t have commercial rights themself. Designers must be able to choose where this UI gets displayed (i.e. for the SPECIFIC models covered by the membership).
Beyond that, there are some minor issues with the new feature, like not being able to change the price without deleting and re-adding the subscription (even if there are currently 0 subscribers). It would also be nice to provide an option for one-time donations, since donations is listed as a use case. I think most folks would be deterred if a donation required them to sign up to a monthly charge, even if they could cancel. Also, the default licensing terms created by MakerWorld’s wizard could probably be fleshed out a bit.
All in all I really like this new feature. I hope MakerWorld quickly addresses the main problem I described. Until designers have a way to specify which models this new UI shows on, I highly suggest the UI be removed from model pages altogether. Otherwise, some hairy legal situations are bound to emerge.
Good point. I think it would be really nice if we could link a commercial license tier to a collection we create, so the user can directly see which models are included in that tier.
