Well. I was thinking maybe you have the slicer calculate volume, and make a charge based on that. And let customers know that there will be additional charge at the end for time. And that once they put in their CC, they will be charged time at the end. And maybe give some sort of estimate.
Then only allow customers to dispute, or request refund for part. But they agreed to pay a rate for time at the beginning and are given an estimate then to. Just like any sort of hourly contact work.
Hi
I also want to join in this discussion after hearing this ridiculous news from hub.
calculating volume would work (calculate volume and estimate it to be with infill of 30% example or 40%) it would be doable I believe. (oh and this volume slicing can be done with python at least)
I have no delusions that this was created as anything more than a purgatory to contain all discussion on this topic. That being said, the support team could have continued closing and un-listing threads, but they have allowed us an opportunity to continue using their forums. I would hope the community can use this as a chance to rationally discuss the changes being made and their effects.
@Odense3DPrint, thank you for setting this up! My hope is to keep this thread more centered on the 3DHubs platform and the upcoming changes, but would certainly love to continue the discussion on viable outside alternatives.
Half of my stuff has come in between 11 PM and 3 AM. All of my orders have been local pick up so if I turn off the hub at night I am forcing local people to potentially have to pay for shipping with a hub they don’t want to use in the first place.
I think being forced to choose to miss jobs simply because a customer wants to place an order in the middle of the night rather than respond during reasonable hours is ridiculous.
That is not a good service model.
How many on line businesses tell you “orders after XXX time will be processed tomorrow”?
It is not unreasonable to respond to over night/off hours orders in a timely fashion the next day.
Yes just like Maker Bot. history repeats.
Building on the Maker community and then dropping them for the bigger fish. Do you know anyone that owns a new Model from Makerbot?? No? exactly… my Replicator 2 still runs fine and i tinker how i want…
You forget that those “Makers” include more of those “Professional engineers” than you think.
If you are a professional manufacturer, you don’t need 3DHubs. But for a small hub it made perfect sense.
I am done with this platform since a year now.
Because of a unfair platform moderation and rating and especially because of those “professional” Users and customers which are really just entitled rich brats.
You can keep your money. I will stick to the Weirdo Maker.
Mark my words, this platform will be gone in 2 years.
Of course there needs to be “standards” but when you have 3dhubs saying they need only the best quality parts, their words, then eliminating a hub for have a response time that is 16 minutes over their “limit” when every other “standard” is perfect makes no sense.
It is a metric that has too many variables to use as a hard fast rule. It is a more suitable metric to use in conjunction with other ones.
And yes, orders that have come in during the middle of the night have counted to my average. Others have shown this as well. If they weren’t counted my response time would be a couple minutes.
3dHubs want’s to use this metric but refuses to address some very basic flaws in it. No one says don’t use it but fix it to where it is a realistic gauge.
You will have to provide a W9 for tax purposes. I’d contact them to ask about your specific situation.
I have found their support to be very nice and helpful.
This is really sad. After 523 completed orders: “thanks for the help and screw you”.
For all those complaining about the requirements for fulfilled by 3d hubs, I don’t think any of that mattered. It was just so they could justify refusing any hub they wanted. Even if we all had perfect scores, that wouldn’t mean they would have to keep everyone.
3D hubs just wants to be another i.materialise or shapeways without doing any of the actual work. Maybe I’m being naive, but I don’t see this model going a long way.
Prices will most certainly go up and all the students and hobbyists will desperately look somewhere else for their prints.
I sure hope someone else has the means and time to make a replacement for 3d Hubs as it was in the beginning so we can go back to something that worked and was good for everyone. I was trying to convince my sister to do something like this and told her “who comes up with an alternative will make a lot of money very fast”. Unfortunately she didn’t do it, so I hope someone else does it.
I am in the same boat, though I didn’t start as early. I helped write the knowledge base. When they introduced the rating system and the express orders, my approval rating tanked because of the customers ordering parts using the express system and then they couldn’t be printed, so I stopped using the express offering, so now I am no longer able to be a Hub. Seems like a catch 22, especially with their penalty system on cancelled orders.
Well, we were already getting penalized before. We were maybe “too nice”, so we almost never refuse orders. I would go as far as to redraw their models in order for them to print correctly, no extra charges. But still we got a lot of people who had to idea about 3d printing and expected production quality products, or who didn’t understand how near unprintable their objects were. We also had people complaining they ordered something from shapeways and complaining the results in resin weren’t exactly the same.
Just one customer leaving a bad review affects the ratings a lot. But we weren’t too bothered because we did get a lot of returning customers, which I think means much more than any review based rating.
I was penalized for: Unprintable models - non-watertight, etc, that the customer didn’t want to pay to fix, weapons orders, orders where the part orientation wasn’t correct when uploaded and as a result didn’t fit on my printer, orders where the material selected on an express order wasn’t what the customer wanted, and orders where the customer placed the same order four or five times. Every time I asked for a review some of them were taken off, but I was never able to fully recover and my last review didn’t change anything.
The lowest customer rating I had was four starts on one order. 3D Hubs would not share their rating system because they were afraid of abuse by hubs.
I do 3d printing as a hobby and a side business and this is the end of it for me as the latter. I’ve helped print prosthetic parts, made models for a local company of their full-scale products and printed for numerous students for their end of term products. All of these were done through the ability to be local, last minute jobs printed in short time and picked up or delivered in person, sometimes on the same day. I’ve provided model tweaking, re-slicing and reprinting for no extra charge because it helped the customer. 3D Hubs helped me to help others, and took their cut for facilitating it.
All of that personal touch will now be lost and for them to do this to all the hubs that helped them get to the place they are now, is a massive kick in the slats.
This will be their end and they have orchestrated it.
So people should have turned down business from 3dhubs because they didn’t have more places for business? Of course 3d hubs can do what they want and have no liability for what anyone decided to do based on the work they got from them, but people can still be upset, right?
Hey guys, since most of you know, 3DHubs will be moving fully to B2B (business to business) meaning only businesses will be able to have a Hub. I understand the decision to that movement, so I am here to ask what will happen with us (3D printing enthusiasts)? Where will we be able to go to list our printers, to be able to provide cheap enthusiast to customer 3D printing services? This decision that 3DHubs is taking is making me think of selling my printer due to not knowing what else to do with it.
there are several options from making your own website or creating for instance a special facebook page where you represent yourself, a nice website to search services and presentate yourself is https://www.3dseeker.com/ 36 a bit like 3dhubs in the early days, also it would be great if you join this conversation
Aspects of what you say tally with my experience - far too many potential customers didn’t have a clue about additive manufacturing, so needed to be led carefully (for which see “free consultancy”). Then go to a hobbyist who undercharged on the actual printing… CF a lot of time spent back & forth on ring design (unwearable, unprintable) that needed significant CAD rework.
Worst I had was a customer who hid a couple of parts inside a larger object to avoid the per-object charge, then later contacted me to complain it had been received damaged but had signed for it as undamaged (insured shipping service). They complained to 3DHubs, who offered to refund the customer in full, but me on the resin only. Dug my heels in on that; it was also a prime reason why I shut my hub down a while ago. This latest move is little more than an extension of that attitude towards the hubs.
I agree. Hubs used to make it easy for community members to locate and screen services. It seems they’ve taken the Google model to heart and are focused on maximizing returns from their most successful members. Not what I’d originally signed up for, nor what they pitched to everyone.