I think most of your questions are answered with a no. The only thing 3d hubs will provide is the access to this forum. Everything else will be gone.
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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.
No, the impression I had is that they were going to have both peer to peer and industrial divisions for projects that couldn’t be done any other way. What this is in the end is an example of how companies these days forget that their employees are the customers, and the customers no matter how small are significant. If you noticed most companies in manufacturing do no cater to anyone doing one offs or small projects. This kills innovation and the small inventor. Kills small business and that’s really the point of all this.
I am going to cancel my FormLabs Fuse1 pre-order due to the non-existent orders that has become the norm around here. I used to get at least an order a day, and often more.
That’s unfortunate, and although before you could still maybe hold on to some hope things would get better, now you can be sure they won’t. From Oct 1st most of us will be kicked out.
So it looks like they have disabled the ability to leave comments in any completed orders. So now a customer has no way to contact us for repeat orders or to ask questions. I have previous customers sometimes message me in an old order to ask questions before they place a new order with me. Sometimes they had some issues with their design and wanted feedback to modify it and then submit new order also.
I dont really care about these upcoming changes since change is inevitable. But dont mess with our repeat customers. Thats a good precentage of my business on here. Do a good job and they come back to you. You piss them off and they just stop using 3dhubs all together. Then we both lose.
Are you surprised? I don’t think they will even let customers know. I contacted the one repeat customer who had an open order with me and he had no idea things were changing.
It would give us a chance to pull those users from them.
I’m assuming it wouldn’t be good for business to let hubs try to “steal” their customers. Although I think we could all argue they were our customers, and that 3d hubs was just a facilitator. We made the invoices directly to the customers, not to 3d hubs. I’m very curious how 3d hubs “post apocalypse” will be like. I have some difficulty believing they will be as accessible to most of my customers as I was.