2021 New Thingiverse Alternatives | 3d Printing Models

hi this is irv shapiro with the make with tech channel and i haven't made a video in over two weeks but i have a good excuse i've been thinking about thingiverse and i i've been doing more than thinking about thingiverse you see my background over the last 40 years is when i was back in the corporate world prior to becoming a youtube creator i built software companies software technology companies and i packaged them and i sold them i did that three times so i know a little bit about what it takes to build and operate a software-based business let's say a business like thingiverse many of us in the creator maker 3d printing world have a love-hate relationship with thingiverse for the last four years or so it's generally the first place i go to look for a model i want to print unfortunately all too often my experience is disappointing and the performance of the site is slow or maybe doesn't work at all but then i remember the joy i felt when i discovered the possibilities of customizer and then thingiverse basically took it all away because for a very long time now customizer doesn't seem to even work at all that gave me an opportunity to do a video on how to use open s-cad on models you downloaded from thingiverse but wasn't quite satisfying so in this video i'm going to look at three things you're going to want to watch the whole video to learn about all three of those first i'm going to ask what's wrong with thingiverse we're going to look at the history thing a verse and i'm going to speculate on what's happening there second we're going to look at seven alternatives to think of us there are many more than seven there must be over 20. we're going to look at seven of them and i'm going to share my observations about those alternatives then we're going to have some fun then i'm going to share with you a vision very loosely very early that i have for what a new type of alternative thingiverse might look like because i'm interested in your comments i'm interested in learning what you think about the need for something new and different for folks that have 3d printers at home or in their small businesses and are looking for models so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] now before i ask the question what's wrong with thingiverse i want to introduce those of you that might be new to this channel to make with tech here at make with tech we help people learn how to use desktop technology 3d printers electronics a little bit of software a little bit of woodworking various crafting techniques we teach people how to use these things to make things to create to innovate so we have close to 200 videos on the channel already and generally we publish every week or so as i said it's been a bit of a gap because i'm thinking about thingiverse and i'll explain why that took some time a little bit later but if you wanna catch all these videos subscribe to the channel click on the bell and as always feel free to share any of these videos they're completely free on any social media anywhere you'd like now let's look at the history of thingiverse and then talk about my speculation about what's going wrong thingiverse was founded in 2008 by zach smith zach smith is also one of the founders of makerbot makerbot being a remarkable company that really introduced the consumer and educational world to the power of 3d printing then in 2013 everything's changed makerbot was acquired by stratasys stratasys is a successful one of the leaders of industrial 3d printing 3d printing for doctors offices for dentists offices for manufacturing 3d printing for architects making models they're in a variety of industries and they're a big business with over half a billion over 500 million dollars of revenue last year now thingiverse is by far the most successful online site that catalogs and distributes models for people using 3d printers let me share with you some information about thingiverse and this information comes from my site dot info they estimate that thingiverse has over 17 million visitors a month and that they generate over 200 228 000 to be exact dollars of revenue per month on the ads they run that means they're approaching three million dollars of revenue a year now to you and i that might be an okay business a pretty good business and how much does it really take to keep thingiverse up and running there's really no direct consumer engagement there but in spite of that thingiverse feels like a neglected child it feels like stratasys doesn't quite know what to do with it because there's such passion in the hobbies and educational space for thingiverse it seems like they don't want to shut it down but they don't want to pay a lot of attention to it now recently over the last year or so they have done a facelift and they've improved their performance a bit but key features such as the customizer don't work i just want to try the customizer again this week and i saw that a model i had submitted for customization nine months ago was still in the queue it's broken just a few weeks ago many of us saw announcements in the industry in the space on the internet that thingiverse had been hacked now in and of itself that's not a terrible thing it's really hard to secure sites and there is no credit card information on thingiverse so what did they get maybe some email address and other things but what's upsetting is thingiverse didn't come out and take responsibility they didn't announce this they declined to really provide any true information so what we heard about this was all secondhand and unfortunately whether it's a good practice or bad many of us do use the same password on multiple sites so if the hack included usernames and passwords that's of some concern so the question we're going to explore a bit more in this video today is a time for us to leave thingiverse to go somewhere else and what are those alternatives now we're going to look at seven really eight alternatives here if you look at the slide the two sites on the top cg trader and happy 3d are commercially focused sites they have different goals and we're going to look at that but they're in the business of making money by selling models if you go to the green section in the middle you'll see two sites cults 3d and my mini factory that are also in the business of selling models but if you go look at those sites there's a lot of ads on those sites they're also attempting to capture eyeballs and make money on advertising and it just has the feel because they keep changing where they place ads how they run ads that they're struggling a bit to find the right revenue model now there's a reason for that i took the data from my mini factory that i could find online and the data from thingiverse and i looked at estimates that i obtained online for their revenue revenue specifically from ads and what i found was that for these sites for both of them it's interesting the number came up almost exactly the same they generate about 12 cents per model per month of revenue so if they want to build a viable business they need a lot of models thingiverse is way ahead in that area with close to 2 million models so they clearly make the most money from advertising and so the game if you're attempting to compete with thingiverse on an ad basis is to get as many models as possible so both cults 3d and my mini factory also offer paid models and a model might sell for a couple dollars or 10 15 20 dollars maybe more prices are set by the designers and a cut goes to the designer and a cut goes to the site it does seem they're both struggling with that model we'll see that my mini factory has a unique twist on that when we look at the site the next list of sites in blue are vendor provided sites the goal of those sites is to get people to think about their printers and yes they have models that you can print on any 3d printer you don't have to use a model from the prusa site on a prusa printer or a model from the creality site on a creality printer but their motivation as a site sponsored by a vendor they say if you think about their printer and these three sites actually have the best performance they seem to do the best job of delivering a consistent product they have fewer models but the performance of the sites are better and the last site listed here is very different it's a site designed to help you learn to use script-based computer-aided design that's where you write something like a programming language in order to design a model we're going to look at that a little bit later and if you're interested in things like openscad i recommend you take a look at cadhub.xyz now let's look at these sites together we're going to begin on the cg trader site cg trader is clearly a very professional business if i recall correctly it has outside funding i believe it's venture funding and their initial business which has evolved was to create a place for designers to sell 3d models used in games for catalogs in commercial image work so it wasn't really focused on people looking for things to 3d print and that has a side effect we'll see in a moment if you see here on the front page here's a beautiful image 3d image of a chair that you might see in a catalog online as we scroll down the site you'll see they have specific services for businesses where they'll come into your business and they'll help you digitize items so you can show them as part of an online catalog they also have a division of the company that sells software to integrate with online catalogs if we do continue down you will see they do sell models including models for 3d printing so let's go to the search box here that says there are over 1.3 million 3d models let's type in shelf bracket we'll just see what comes up and there are a lot of models that came up and the performance of this site is excellent so let's go to one of these shelf brackets and you'll see this shelf bracket has a picture of it in a slicer so it's clearly optimized for 3d printing and for seven dollars i can buy this bracket i think this is a very good site for practical items now let's look at another very practical site called happy 3d appi 3d is a site where you can buy replacement parts for various appliances and i think this is the future of a lot of 3d printing i think manufacturers aren't going to stock spare parts anymore they're going to stock plans and they'll either 3d print them on demand for you or you'll print them yourself unfortunately the site is very limited and they're just not a lot of models yet but i think it's an interesting site to think about now let's go to cults cult is a site with also a large number of models both free and paid and they have a fair amount of advertising on the site now let me put in the same search i've put in on the other sites shelf bracket and let's see what comes up and not very many practical prints here so as in many of these sites if we go back to the home page let's clear this search and go back to the front here you'll see they have lots of fun things of cute things of figurines but it appears they're just not a lot of practical prints so cd traders seem to have the majority of the practical prints we've seen so far let's look at another site my mini factory and my mini factory is doing some interesting experiments in monetization if you look at the site you'll see there are ads right on the home page including a lot of ads for my mini factory many of the models are for the gaming community where people use these as part of game play or various props for game play and they've done something very interesting here they've created the idea of tribes a tribe is basically a creator a designer who has a series of models and you pay them a certain amount of subscription money per month so they're looking for a way to both support designers and their business in addition to the actual sale of models so let's look here for shelf brackets and there are four premium models and 64 free models we can go to one of these free models and the performance here was pretty good ads popping up once again pretty much all over the place so it's a bit of a busy site does seem to be a good alternative for some of these practical models but maybe we could do better now let's go to one of the manufacturer's site we'll start with prusa just as everything prusa does it's well done now prusa printers may be on the high end of your budget but this site seems to have a very nice selection of models and if i search for shelf brackets i get some very nice selections okay here you'll see a shelf bracket that came up in our search and you'll notice this here there's a printer model listed that indicates that you can download the either raw model and slice it yourself or there might be a pre-sliced model now i'm not a fan of pre-sliced models because as i've shared in this video and others every printer is a little different i think you have to tune your models but if we go here to download you'll see there are both options and you'll find on this site that many of the pre-sliced models are not for pre-sliced just for prusa printers i've seen models here for creality printers also so this is actually quite an interesting alternative prusa is doing a very very good job here let's look at some others the next one is creality the creality cloud is really part of an ecosystem where creality is trying to make it easier to print to your 3d printer right from your phone from your smartphone and so the model repository is part of that once again a lot of gaming and figurine models let's search for shelf bracket and not very much comes up here well when creality first offered this site it appeared into the market with thousands of models right away question is where'd they get those well if you looked at a lot of them they were just scraped right off of the thingiverse site created a lot of concern in the community about intellectual property rights and whether that was the right thing to do well crowdy has clamped down on this issue and if you had signed up for the site registered upload a model uploaded a model you'll see that reality now requires you to identify the ownership of the model and if you're sharing the model not just printing it for yourself you have to select a creative commons license for the model and they've indicated they'll take all models that are not properly licensed off the site so the number of models on the creality site recently has gone down let's look at one more vendor site that's the ultimaker site this is a very clean very simple site they have one very nice feature they have a 3d viewing environment that's extremely well done unfortunately they have a limited number of models many of those models are add-ons for ultimaker printers so we'll see there are 22 shelf brackets listed here not really very much variety here's one that's a bit interesting and it's a simple site but because it just doesn't have a lot of models it may not be what we're looking for what's the commonality across these sites well a lot of 3d characters not a lot of practical prints not boxes and dividers for the drawers in my office for shelf brackets for replacement parts there are sites that have those but nobody's really nailed that piece of the marketplace the closest one is thingiverse and that's just because i have so many models they cover everything number two they're limited customization options to have a shelf bracket just the right size for that custom shelf i'm putting up in my child's room there'd have to be hundreds of shelf brackets now i can scale a bracket up or down but then it really changes in both directions if i don't scale uniformly the holes for the screws won't be round anymore i'd like to have more customization option and it's clear everyone's struggling with a revenue model so let's look at an alternative and to do that let's first look at openscad so here's a model i built we can actually go over here and see the code that i wrote for this model and that code is unimportant because in this new model environment that i'm thinking about the end user would never see that code they would see an image on the screen that looks like this they'd have the ability to move the image around to rotate it to look at it from different angles they'd also have the ability to change the model so if i change this from a width of 60 millimeters to width of 30 i have a narrower shelf bracket they'd have the ability to size it for different size shelves let's say we move this down to a hundred millimeters and then we can make the sidewall also much smaller they'd have the ability to change the size of the screw holes let me show you one more example so you can see the power of this type of environment okay here on the screen we see a box now i can make the box higher by changing this over here so i could measure that drawer in the kitchen that has all this junk to sign them and make boxes to fit in there so let me move this back down a little bit to make it a little easier to see but i also could divide the box into multiple segment sections so we can see here we have dividers i could make the section dividers higher let's make them 26. now they're higher i could add section dividers in the other direction maybe i want a box for earrings so you see here with one model i have hundreds of possibilities so imagine all of the practical things you need at home that you'd like to 3d print and all of those are available online and you can customize them that's the vision i have let's look at a slide together so this site would emphasize practical print there'd be many less models maybe just thousands of models not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands because each one could be customized in many many different ways initially we would emphasize openscad because if you google the various cad scripting languages that has the vast majority of the marketplace it's a mature product we know the environment will work we'd have strong ip protection intellectual property protection because we would protect the scripts so if a designer uploads a script it's only the customized models that people would be able to download now we could sell models one at a time but i think a more sustainable business model to pay for all the development time and the support and the hosting that's going to be required here would be to sell subscriptions maybe you can try it out for a certain number of months but you sign up for an annual subscription perhaps this is an annual subscription that you can actually cancel at any time but it still gives you an incentive to sign up for a longer period of time another alternative is that single downloaded models might be very expensive maybe that shelf bracket would be 15 bucks if you only want to pay for the bracket but it would be two bucks out of your annual subscription allocation we'd have mechanisms for paying designers a portion of the fees collected by the site so we can both support the site and support the designers and maybe to cover the costs of building the site which would be hundreds or thousands of hours of development time we use a kickstarter campaign so those are some of the things i'm thinking about i'm thinking about should we stay with thingiverse if we don't are the existing sites what we need or are the existing sites great for gamers and desktop characters but maybe for practical prints we need something new cg trader is a very professional site for practical prints but it doesn't really support customization so do we need something new well folks i hope you found this discussion interesting i'm really really interested in your comments either below here on youtube or go to forum.makewithtech.com where there's a discussion group i'm sponsoring where at no cost to you you can participate in this discussion please subscribe to the channel click on the bell share this video with lots of people who might be interested in this discussion and don't forget let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 76,412

Keywords: 3D Printing, 3D Printed, 3D Printer, Tips, Tricks, Help, Troubleshooting, how to, 3d print, Thingiverse, Why is Thingiverse so slow, How to speed up thingiverse, Slow, .STL, MyMinifactory, PinShape, 3D Printing Nerd, Makers Muse, replica prop, 3d printed mask, how to 3d print, Best 3D Printing Website, 3D Printable Files, 3D Printable, 3D Printing Tips, Thingiverse Alternatives, Fab365, PrusaPrinters, CGtrader, Cults3D, openscad

Id: qFqGn16ra8Y

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021