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.
Been on Treatstock for a while, never had any orders from them, and they’re also fairly US centric
Does treatstock also allow non-companies?
I mean, users who own a 3D printer, and not companies?
It is a pitty that they mostly US centric, because I live in the Netherlands (Europe).
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.
Did anyone else just have their orders/hub dashboard just stop loading?
It still works for me…
yeah, seems I am running into an API issue or something.
If only they were legally liable… I have 3 Form 2 printers, resins and accessories that I bought just because of 3dhubs.
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?
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.
A properly designed system should allow them to monitor all conversations for certain words and flag them for staff to look over later to see if hubs are trying to move orders offsite. Only thing this does is inconvenience everyone.
Unethical hubs that are trying to move future orders offsite would just include a note in box when shipping order. So this does nothing to stop that.
So your complaint is that they weren’t smart enough in depriving the hubs of any future income from customers they had through 3d hubs?
Unethical? Are you serious?
Unethical is to build your entire business on the backs of the hubs and them kick them out when you think you can do better without them.
I could agree a hub was unethical if they were trying to move customers out of 3d hubs 2 years ago, but certainly not now. No one in their right mind is thinking if it’s correct to take customers from 3d hubs when there’s a knife stuck in their backs.
Plenty has been said, but I just want to add my voice to those saying this is wrong. WE made you, and now you just kick us out. How can you do this? How has there not been any response from the 3DHubs team here?
Wow, and you took away our ability to contact our customers? So we have no way to continue our business relationships with those people who found us through 3DHubs? That is really messed up.
While we allowed 3D Hubs to operate for its first several years, there have been several announcements that they would be working toward a business-to-business model. They just didn’t state clearly until now what impact that would have. I am not surprised they are eliminating as many contact methods as possible; it means they can continue business as normal without contacting customers, so the customers don’t know anything has changed, which is helpful for 3D Hubs.
I agree that it is a little underhanded and I have asked them for transparency on how things will happen moving forward and asked for a time where our Hubs stay active but unable to take orders so that we can answer any questions, but they have of course not responded. Makes me a little disappointed that I spend hours working on their knowledge base with no reimbursement.
I doubt they are monitoring these threads as they have no reason to do so.
Don’t feel bad about it. There was no guarantee you wouldn’t be kicked out if you had better scores. I don’t trust any hub that has 5.0 scores, there’s no way that’s legit.
@JDMusicLabs I have 409 reviews, everything but print quality is listed as 5.0, print quality is 4.9; my last 50 order average is 4.97.
My completion rating is 89.6% because I had to turn down weapons orders, because I had four users who stopped responding to questions about their orders, and because I had customers request a material that was inappropriate for the use, not to mention the users who expected me to somehow complete a 5 day print order in two days. Requests for review of my completion rating went ignored.
Clear opaque, seriously? Isn’t that just white?