Feel free to discuss the recent 3D Hubs announcement here.
Before you do, if you’re a Hub, please have a look at the related FAQ on the topic here 108.
There are 167 replies with an estimated read time of 25 minutes.
This is what I’ve tried to reply to your mail today regarding the shutting-down of 3Dhub’s actual hubs
This is overwhelmingly stupid to be honest;
There are other platforms that request way less service fee, and are open even to the student which is trying to pay for his university fees by printing stuff for people online.
Thanks for restricting what used to be a nice platform only to a few people.
Thanks again
Is there going to be any process for hubs that may be short on 1 item to appeal not being admitted into the program?
Aside from being 1 order short (easy to fix) my responses are 16 minutes over the “limit” while everything else is perfect.
It would seem a bit counter productive to not allow a maker simply for that when reviews and comments are excellent.
After all, isn’t 3dhubs looking for quality parts?
@Robin3D Thank you for setting up this thread. Although disheartened by the announcement made this morning, I was more disheartened by what appeared to be suppression of threads discussing this topic. Kudos for keeping the open discussion rolling on this.
Can you explain how are the performance metric system is calculated? In some cases, customer places an order and wishes to cancel the order. How is the performance metrics is calculated in this case?
Or
If a customer places an order and 3D hubs says the part is printable, but in some cases some of the FDM printers cannot print it. In this case the Hub has to cancel it. How do you calculate the performance metric system in this case?
In another case, Customer places an order in the afternoon, but i get messages in the midnight. How do you calculate the response time in this case ?
Makers in 3D Hubs follow strict guidelines given by 3D Hubs. So, It is very important to explain how the metric system is calculated.
If a business wants to maintain standards and follow core values, it is equally important that you should value your service providers at all levels.
I request you to provide detail reasoning on how the metric system is calculated in different cases.
All I can say is wow! This is the biggest F U to those who helped you become what you are in the first place. The whole point of 3D Hubs in the first place was to find local people to print your parts.
You are effectively removing all hobbyists from the platform because it’s pretty much impossible for us to hit the reply times to qualify which I believe is the only thing I don’t qualify for. Most orders I get are while I’m at work or sleeping.
I have been with 3D Hubs since the first day they made it available on the west coast. I’ve represented them at maker faires and at colleges as an ambassador for events they set up to advertise the service. Those I did free of charge because they were such a good thing for the community.
Guess everyone has to cut the throats of the ones that made them great and get greedy eventually.
This, one thousand times.
If I’m not going to find other 3D printing services that offer something like the direct order widget to put on my website, I’m gonna make my own, but sure as eggs is eggs I won’t ever advertise 3Dhubs on my website (or anywhere else) ever again.
Not yet actually.
I mean, I’ve worded wrongly my first post, it’s not the sevice fee the problem, but it’s acutally the fact they decided to completely leave behind their core users, and as I’m reading elsewhere, this is becoming a Shapeways clone.
The cool thing was the order widget, and honestly i’m willing to pay that sweet 12.5% service fee on each order if this means I can still allow people to make purchase trough my website, but I totally see that not coming back.
If somehow I manage to create a working replica of what this website used to be, I’ll let you know. It’s a huge project indeed!
This is so dumb I was very mad when you guys changed it in 2017 and now I can even print for anyone any more. What the heck! Is there any more websites I can use to print for customers please let me know!!!
Please don’t do this! It is not a good idea! People won’t like this, as it will not allow for such a free market, and will cause prices to hike. This is bad for the 3d printing community.
I had a similar thought 10 about building a replacement but what I was envisaging was more a single-tenant system which each small business could host their own version of. In fact one of the key points would be making it open and usable by all - i.e. all the things which made 3D Hubs what it was that they’ve turned their back on.
If there was a way to build both - a central site which could become a trusted destination but which could bring together a load of federated ordering platforms (each of which would be usable by itself also)… well… that would be quite something. Almost like what would happen if you took the current 3D Hubs platform, with each hub having their own site with an order widget on it, and turned it inside-out.
Literally just thinking out loud at this stage but I’m a developer so would definitely contribute what little time I could to building out something like this…
I had a similar thought about building a replacement but what I was envisaging was more a single-tenant system which each small business could host their own version of. In fact one of the key points would be making it open and usable by all - i.e. all the things which made 3D Hubs what it was that they’ve turned their back on.
If there was a way to build both - a central site which could become a trusted destination but which could bring together a load of federated ordering platforms (each of which would be usable by itself also)… well… that would be quite something. Almost like what would happen if you took the current 3D Hubs platform, with each hub having their own site with an order widget on it, and turned it inside-out.
Literally just thinking out loud at this stage but I’m a developer so would definitely contribute what little time I could to building out something like this…
I love this idea
The only similar site I know of is makexyz, but I don’t get any where near as many orders from them
The only alternative i’ve found is Treatstock.com 46 with a widget like 3dhubs.
Of course that supposes we’re beggars… not a viewpoint I subscribe to 
You are right and your point is valid nonetheless, however I think perhaps now we’ve seen it go wrong (i.e. how the ultra-centralisation model can turn sour), we can redo it again but without this weakness.
Don’t worry, your choice of words was absolutely fine 
I agree that any solution is a good one at this point but what I mean is going forward I’d like us to find the right solution. Any solution would be good to get us there, but we should be careful to try and avoid reliance and lock-in now that we’ve seen how it can go bad.
That would be my perfect solution and one I definitely want to persue
It would be great to have some form of web applet to compute in real time the volume, the infill and the support material of the file, convert that to price and then this company would basically intermediate the payment between the customer and the 3D printing service.
Interesting.
I utterly agree with you about the STL volume/infill/material/price calculation stuff and unfortunately I think getting something like that right and reliable is going to be the most challenging part.
In terms of payment though, my thoughts are that each hub (we need another name, but you know what I mean) would do their own. I.e. I could have my ‘hub’ site process payments through Paypal or Stripe or whatever. Then they could have their own processes etc and handle their own business and not have any weird rules about VAT or whether you’ve got the right kind of company…
Maybe we need both options, with it up to each hub to choose if they handle their own payments or if the central authority does it, or if they’re happy to handle either case. Customers could use that as part of their decision as to who to choose if they feel strongly one way or another.
Make no mistake this was by force not intention and the title is vague enough to get buried in a sea of other posts in no time. Great job whoever is back there handling the fallout, should get a raise for sure there will be plenty of cash floating around from the new model lol.
I agree. I understand the point in responding in a timely manor but I think this is one that shouldn’t be such a hard fast rule.
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.
