I never ever followed an idea of making big money.
Personally I have about 200€ / month (which is about 10% of my income) in patreons and subscriptions on various platforms for supporting the creators I take something from, being that a tutorial or a 3D model.
What’s wrong with this platform?
Before taking this decision I heard a lot of other creators and everyone confirmed that commercial license simply doesn’t work.
So in my list this adds to (1) no real support for copyright/intellectual property protection and (2) the increasingly adding of stringent rules and systems that are detrimental to small creators who try to create something with their own efforts, and this is making me reconsider MakerWorld for the worse.
I had a dozen different people ask each week to offer commercial terms.
This went on for a few months.
I didn’t want to because it wasn’t why I do this.
The number of requests I was fielding got so bad that I decided it would be easier to create one.
So, I did. For me, it was also Patreon, as the MW one hadn’t even been a glimmer in the eye of BL.
I reached out to all those who asked me. Let’s just say, it hasn’t been a raging success. Most of those original people who reached out and begged never turned up to put their money where their mouth was.
I also spend a lot of time fighting thieves who think the poultry amount of the monthly charge isn’t worth paying.
I hit a plateau, when one leaves, another joins, the total number appears to be constant. I had hoped it would become a fund for the beneficiaries of my will, though it will be, just, not as lucrative.
I have no suggestions on how to improve the situation.
The closed-source Parametric option was because of my constant demands here, some might say a barrage.
Nothing, thats just a flaw with humanity, they expect something for nothing, i have people ask if they could sell one of my models commercially, none of them want to pay for that right either, thats just life sadly
welcome to the club, i had to make a patreon for that too and non subscribed, after a while i started ignoring users who ask about commercial license and i even got approached by someone who wants me to design for them and post them on their makerworld account !! i mean WTH i cant compete myself with myself lol…and guess what i started ignoring modification requests as well.
users started to seem entitled to boss around for some reason.
so i advice you to give it a few months then better not bother with commercial license this is only for legality incase a legit company want to use your design, other than that I’m pretty sure one of you designs is already being sold somewhere without commercial license.
The closed source Parametric Model Maker was a thing I did also request a lot of time after publishing my Ambigram generator which is so far my most used model. I even told them when I was able to have a direct call with Bambu Lab.
I still appreciate your back up.
On March I started spending some time twice a month searching and reporting all the models being sold on Etsy, ebay, Vinted, etc.
So far I’ve always found models generated with my Ambigram generator on those websites.
I report those which present in the pictures a hidden defect my generator produces with normal parameters, but for a lot of others which are probably generated with my script too, the pictures don’t allow me to see that imperfection so I’m not 100% sure and I simply skip them.
At first I tried to contact the sellers and waited a lot of time. I’ve even seen they read the message, but simply don’t answer and don’t remove the models, so I had to escalate to the platform copyright infringement forms. Nowadays I skip directly to the forms.
The answer is actually very logical: why would someone pay for a membership when you’ve already given them all your work for free? If we want to charge real money for our models, there are already platforms that favor this business method, where the end user only receives the model after paying, and doesn’t just give you a “handout.” It’s simply logical; we can’t live by expecting people to pay for something we’re actually giving away for free.
And secondly, how are we supposed to control the licenses? I’ve seen some of my models being sold on Etsy or Vinted, but it’s simply not worth reporting. The platforms don’t care, and neither does Maker World. And I care even less, because the time I spend reporting and claiming licenses could be spent improving my work and earning more money.
The Maker World system is very good for all the hobbyists who get a few free spools a week, and for the 10-20 most popular designers, such as Sabre Designs, who are undoubtedly earning a decent amount of money for their work.
For the rest, Maker World is not the answer. There are designers on Patreon earning $100k a month with one design a week. I’m just saying, there are other better places to monetize designs directly.
This is our fault. We give away our work (our designs) for free and then expect people to pay us altruistically, but the real world doesn’t work that way.
I used to think that way too, but if you give it away for free, no one will pay for the license. It’s better for everyone to pay for the license even if they don’t sell anything. For example, $10 for 4-8 designs per month is more than fair and economical. And the designer earns much more.
And as I said before, we can’t protect the licenses, so it’s absurd to expect anyone to pay for them, because it’s impossible to go after all the sellers on 20 platforms, not to mention that many people sell in their cities without posting on social media, which is already uncontrollable.
In 2024, I had the opportunity to work with one of the largest subscription repositories currently available, and all of its designs were leaked to Telegram in a matter of minutes, with people selling whatever they wanted without any license. From inside this platform, I can tell you that licenses cannot be protected. The designer’s first goal should be to collect payment for the sale; the rest is a lost cause.
You joined the forum 4 months after one of the times I asked for it. You started asking after you launched a model which was upload months after my request.
Humanity isn’t so bleak. People will and do pay for licenses. There are people that abuse the system, absolutely, but that isn’t reflective of everyone.
My first goal is to make something awesome that people will enjoy. That might even inspire others to do as crazy or big of things.
As someone that’s been around the internet since Web 1.0, there’s no fully protecting anything. It’s a joke to ever think you can keep the cat in the bag. You can wall things up to such an extent to minimize those instances, but then you start alienating customers by making it too burdensome or expensive.
I like that Makerworld is slowly pushing a more youtube-like approach to supporting it’s creators. I want a system where I can provide my wears for free, but get compensated on the back-end. I hope Makerworld further supports and refines those systems.
Not everyone can make it big within that system, but that’s the world at large. That’s the market. Not every youtuber can support themselves yet, but over the years people have been able to develop careers around that model. I hope that’s a future we see in 3d printing as time goes on.
We have the same goal, just with different skill levels.
I am showing my age, but, I used the internet from a terminal command line long before the web was even an idea in the head of Tim Berners-Lee.
A friend showed me when I visited him in university, an event that was so important to me it stuck in my mind, so unimportant to him, he can’t remember the act he performed that gave my life its direction.
You have more hope in MakerWorld than I see coming from them. I hope you are right, I am concerned their actions suggest otherwise.
Several users have already made this request to Maker World in the past, but it does not seem to have been accepted by most of the community.
For me, the ideal situation would be for licenses to be accompanied by exclusive models that users can only download with a paid license, but there does not seem to be general interest in this method.
I’m curious what people would do if you only released the ‘basic’ model on MW and directed users to your patreon if they were interested in variations and more premium features. This would be a hit to your MW metrics, but it could steer people toward actually paying for the extras. And you already have a ‘supporter’ level which is very fair in price.
I honestly wish I was in your position to attempt this, but I still haven’t found my niche.
