Review of 3D Printing Sites

I’ve been on the 3d Model publishing scene for a while now, and have learnt quite a lot from lurking and interacting with various sides of the community to improve my 3D printing skills and protect my models from theft.
In this article, I aim to cover a few websites for publishing 3D-printable objects and share some of the knowledge I gathered from working within each community.

Portions of the site/community that are negative will be displayed in an orange header, whilst positive will be displayed in a green header. Neutral will be in a grey header.

Cults 3D

Whilst Cults allows you to make a store and upload your work for free, or paid, they only allow you to take payment in Euros if you use PayPal, with a minimum withdrawal amount of 5 Euros. If you use Payoneer, you can get paid in USD but the minimum threshold is 7 USD.
You can take a bank transfer into whatever currency you want, but the minimum withdrawal threshold is ludicrous at 500 Euros.

They also sit on the payments for several weeks, stating it is for “refund purposes”, and still they do not automatically pay the funds for you; you have to go back and forth to your sales page to see if you can withdraw payments, and initiate said payments into your account, which still takes multiple days to process.
Percentage-wise, Cults3D take approximately 20% of all sales revenue but also has additional fees from PayPal payments, so you can have 25% of your revenue lost in fees.

It doesn’t matter how well-established you are; I have spoken to some popular model creators on the site, and they have the exact same complaints about the payment system. If you want a streamlined payment experience, you will not get it from Cults3D.

There is also no rewards scheme or incentives to provide models for free on Cults3D, aside from getting traffic to your page.

Uploading is Tedious

You will be presented with a page like my example, where you can provide a lot of information on the model and its categories. When you upload a raw file, such as an STL, Cults3D will generate a render of it that people can interact with, a bit like my 3D models on display on the “notable characters” page of my site.

You cannot embed images or videos into the description, so you will have to include anything that is for setting up the model (before printing it) in the regular pictures area, however, if you upload too many images or videos, your 3D-render sample will be outright removed and there is nothing you can do about it aside from cutting back on your pictures and videos significantly.

The biggest gripe, which is shared by many in the community, is the sheer lack of ability to save a draft; when you upload to Cults3D, it must be done there and then. You cannot save any drafts.

Another huge issue with Cults3D is their servers; they are painfully slow. Sometimes I have uploaded all my images and they display fine in the thumbnails, but when clicked they show nothing. It can take several days for the images to show up, you might get lucky and see them on day one.

The Community is Divided

Every model creator I spoke to on Cults3D was professional and friendly, we could talk about pretty much anything in the mesh-making world and a lot of techniques I picked up were from these people, but the same cannot be said for all the “Makers” of the community.

For definition’s sake, a “Maker” is someone who 3D prints the models, and that’s it; they do not work with Meshes, Rigs, or Topology. They do not use 3D modelling software; they use Slicers.

Makers usually leave pictures of their prints on the models’ page or leave feedback. On Cults3D, I rarely saw them do either.

Some model creators 3D print other people’s work too and can be called Makers, but the side of the community I am identifying as problematic are the exclusive Makers who have never touched a 3D modelling program in their life, and are there just to print models for money. Be cautious of these people in particular, as they treat even a free model as if it were something they paid you for, that you work for them even though they don’t pay you anything, and that your assets are up for them to sell at trade shows regardless of what the license says.

You cannot do anything to stop these people on the site, you can’t even report them; you can only protect your assets from theft by applying stamps to the mesh, ingrained deep enough so that if they attempt to “shave” it off using their slicer they will just ruin the model.

For example, the below image shows the head of my Articulated Shenron v2; the jaw has a stamp with my creator’s name on it, and if a thief tries to shave it off or cover it with primitives, the jaw will not print correctly. Heads are often the most common part of a model to be ripped and used in Remixes, so I would propose applying your stamp to the underside of any heads you make.

There is no forum on Cults3D, and I am glad there isn’t.

Search and Discoverability is Excellent

The search feature and categories are excellent on Cults3D, and people organically find my items and pages relatively well. Whilst Cults3D still suffers from GenAI garbage like most of the internet these days, it shows very little impact on the search engine, favouring models with real photographs over models with a simple render or no images at all.

Theft is Relatively Low

I rarely, if ever, see other creators’ models reuploaded to Cults3D, including bogus or illegal Remixes. The reason? You get no rewards for sharing models for free, and you cannot sell models without a payment system in place; perpetrators of stolen models are often under the legal age limit to open a PayPal, Payoneer, or Stripe account.

With no incentive or rewards in place, they have no reason to upload to Cults3D. However, whilst stolen models aren’t shared much ON Cults3D, a lot of models get stolen FROM Cults3D.

Printables

Printables allow you to start selling models right away, or I should say, a single model. Once you set up Stripe as your payment provider, you can list one model to sell; if you sell it ten times, you can then add four more models. Sell twenty-five, and the figure is bumped up to ten models. To have unlimited models up for sale, you need to sell a total of fifty items.

All models are charged, and you are paid, in USD straight into your bank account. There is no holding of payment, and no manual payout scheme; everything is handled automatically through Stripe.

Depending on your country’s currency, the conversion rate may affect how much Stripe pays into your bank account.
Percentage-wise, Printables take 20% of all sales revenue and don’t include fees for using Stripe to pay you.

Whilst the payment process is excellent, setting up the shop is really slow, especially with how poor their search algorithm works.

Uploading is Streamlined and Pleasant

You will be presented with a page like my example, where you can provide a lot of information on the model and its categories. When you upload a raw file, such as an STL, Printables will generate a render of it that people can interact with, a bit like Cults3D, only significantly better. The 3D render also doesn’t vanish if you upload a lot of pictures!

You can embed images and video into your model description, and also format the text with headers, bold or italic styles, and even underlines.

You can save your progress as a draft anytime you wish, and all files uploaded to their servers without any errors or delays. Overall, a far more pleasant experience.

The Community is Distant

Unlike Cults3D, not every model creator I messaged got back to me. Even Makers were relatively quiet, rarely leaving comments or pictures of their prints.
The only way to feel a part of this community is to engage with them on the forums, however, the Printables/Prusa Forums are so poorly optimised and slow that they are just not pleasant to use.

If you have issues with a person on the site or spot stolen work, you can report it. The reporting process is VERY hands-off, however; once you send the report, you won’t know if action has been taken or not against the offending individual.

Search and Discoverability is Poor

The categories are excellent on Printables, however, the search feature and organic discoverability are shameful. GenAI garbage shows very little impact on the search engine, favouring models with real photographs, but the sheer quantity of reuploaded stolen content, or bad quality remixes, drowns out the algorithm, leaving your models buried beneath a torrent of trash.

Theft is Moderate

Prusameters are points you earn through using the site, such as sharing models on Printables. For certain milestones, such as getting thirty downloads and three likes on a single model, you get Prusameters. You don’t need to set up any bank or payment details to earn these points, and the points are redeemed through a week-long manual review period. You redeem the points for free spools of filament, and Prusa-themed clothing, or save up enough and you can get an entire 3D printer for free with them.

This incentive has unfortunately attracted model thieves; if you live within range of the Prusa delivery hub, you don’t need to pay for postage and can have things sent to you without setting up payment systems. This allows minors to exploit the system to free stuff and trust me, they do; models stolen from my Makerworld and Cults3D accounts were all taken by people who were very obviously under the age of 18, stating on their profiles that they came just to “get a free printer”.

Printables has made no indication of improving their incentive system, to require uploaders to register with a payment system assigned to the account. They have also failed to acknowledge this very obvious flaw in their system, and don’t seem to listen to community feedback.

MakerWorld

Keeping it simple; you cannot sell anything on MakerWorld. Your models must always be free. Also, the Customer Support for all of BambuLab’s stuff is atrocious, including MakerWorld.

Uploading is Streamlined and Pleasant

When you upload a file of any kind, MakerWorld generates a 3D render that people can view and interact with, much like Printables.

You can embed images and video into your model description, and also format the text with headers, bold or italic styles, and even underlines.

The Community is Criminally Toxic

Model creators, who haven’t come from Cults3D or Printables at least, were all very aggressive and spiteful whenever I tried to talk to them if they bothered to reply to my messages. The overall vibes I got from people were anger or paranoia, and having used the site for nearly a year I can understand now why model creators are so hostile.

Makers on this site are the sole root of the entire site’s problems, and MakerWorld’s owner, bambuLab, has themselves to blame for this.
BambuLab, the owner of MakerWorld, advertised this platform for their printers to use, which in turn are advertised as “beginner-ready” printers. Anyone with experience in 3D printing knows there is no such thing as a “beginner-ready” printer; you have to learn machine quirks, material requirements, hotend and hotplate cleaning techniques, bed levelling, proper processing for removal of the print from the hotplate, and so on.

90% of all Makers on MakerWorld that interact with my work do not know ANY of these things, and a vast portion of that percentage don’t read anything you put on the site either. They have been led to believe BambuLab stuff works right out of the box, and that if their print fails it’s the model creator’s fault, and not their lack of 3D printing knowledge.

The forums are just outright horrendous; what started out as a pleasant enough community back in the Beta days has turned into a toxic wasteland of disgruntled BambuLab customers taking their anger out on creators, rather than learning to work with their machines.

You can report everything and everyone, it’s easy to do and handled pretty quickly. You also get notified if your report is accepted or rejected. However, with the rate at which you’ll be hitting that report button, it doesn’t make any difference how fast the staff deals with it; the root of the problem still exists and will continue to sprout more things to be reported.

Much like Printables, this can be explained by MakerWorld having people who are very obviously under the age of 18 using it, only there are far more of them. We’ll cover this under the theft category soon.

Search and Discoverability is a Mess

It doesn’t matter if the search engine or categories are any good, you simply cannot utilise them properly because of several terrible decisions MakerWorld had made during its development.
The first mistake is that MakerWorld not only embraces GenAI trash, but it also encourages it actively by giving it its own category. This has opened the floodgates to GenAI swill flooding into the site at such a rapid rate, that any genuine models get buried the instant they are uploaded.
Another issue is with the uploading of trash models; people uploading nothing but a cube, multiple times a day, for several weeks, is one example. This is done for point-farming and serves no other purpose.

So, unless you’re already well established, good luck trying to get anywhere on the algorithm of the site; there is that much rubbish on it, it’s no wonder the 3D printing community as a whole calls it “TrashWorld”.

Theft is Very High

To put it simply; MakerWorld Points work similarly to Prusameters from Pritnables. You get points by interacting with the site, primarily by sharing models. The only major difference is that, unlike Printables, point redemption is done automatically and NOT by manual review. Your account can get manual reviews now and again if you get a lot of points very quickly, or if your account is suspected of point-farming, but these have done nothing to solve the problems the site has.

Like Printables, kids can make accounts, and farm points, and redeem those points for gift cards to spend on anything in the BambuLab store; if they get enough cards, they can get things from the site for free, and not require payment information to be set up.

You will find stolen models, botched illegal remixes, fake models, GenAI filth, and reuploads of reuploads on the home page daily. It doesn’t matter what systems MakerWorld introduces, the point farmers will continue to exploit it.

BambuLab is so determined to make its platform the largest collection of free 3D models that they are prepared to allow blatant theft and poor quality to swell their numbers. They show little interest in the community concerns, even if they say they do care about them. It’s all meaningless words to state the populace and reassure them that even though they are going to do nothing about the problem, they still hear them.

Thingiverse

Also, like Cults3D, there is no reward scheme or incentives to provide models for free, aside from getting traffic to your page.

Uploading is Great

When you upload a raw file, such as an STL, Thingiverse will generate a render of it that people can interact with, like all the other sites we’ve covered so far.

You cannot embed images or videos into the description. However, as the form for uploading is split into different sections, you can upload “Post Printing” videos and photographs that feature at the bottom of your models’ page, and there is a section to include instructions for print set-up.

Whilst this is the slowest upload form of all the sites, the fact it splits up sections means it’s impossible for users to not see the instructions unless they blatantly choose to ignore them.

You can save your upload as a draft anytime and come back to it later. Sadly there are no text formatting options.

The Community is also Great

Creators were both friendly and informative, and the community work together to crack down on thieves stealing models.
Sure, I received spam from bots, but these aren’t real people, so I don’t count them as part of the community. The real people, whom I interacted with, were great.

Search and Discoverability is Excellent

The search feature and categories are excellent and people organically find my items and pages relatively well. GenAI trash is never featured on the front page, and uploads of it seems relatively low.

Stolen from here, never Uploaded here

Like Cults3D; you get no rewards for sharing models for free, and you cannot sell models, so what reason do thieves have to upload there? The simple answer is, they don’t. However, a lot of models, and I do mean a LOT, get stolen from Thingiverse.

Within 10 hours of uploading it to Thingiverse, my Articulated Kohaku model was stolen and reuploaded without credit to Printables. A model, which has been on Makerworld and Printables since December 2023.

The amount of bots I see on the site confirms my suspicions that model thieves use bot crawlers to grab models that are trending, and automatically upload them to Printables and Makerworld to farm points. Because this site is the oldest of the ones in my review, it makes sense that the crawlers are so fast; they’ve had years to train it on this site.

Creality Cloud

When listing your models for sale, you assign a price in “credits” that you later redeem for cash through Paypal or Payoneer, or you can hold onto them to spend on the site. Creality Cloud also lets you assign prices below $1, which is great for smaller projects.

Unlike Printables; there are no limits to how many models you can put up for sale, and unlike Cults3D, there is no “holding” period before you can withdraw funds. However, the processing time for withdrawals is 10 days, which is still longer than with Printables, and notably shorter than Cults3D.

You can only withdraw twice a month, which isn’t so bad for small-time creators like myself, but if you’re fortunate enough to net hundreds of dollars worth in sales every month, it might be an issue for you.

There is a commission fee for requesting payouts, which you still need to do manually like with Cults3D. This fee is 10% the payout amount, so if you request $10, the fee is $1. On top of this is the dreadful PayPal processing fee; it’s locked at $5.20, so if you request a $10 payout, you lose more than 50% in fees.

Uploading is Easy

When you upload a raw file, such as an STL, Creality Cloud will generate a render of it. Users can interact with the render if they click the rendered image. Just be aware, some of the preview renders make the model look squished or blurry.

The major difference between Creality Cloud and the other uploaders is that you have a very limited amount of space to save drafts of your uploads, without paying for a premium account. Yes; this site has Premium features. It’s not expensive but I cannot afford it with my unstable income, so I will not be covering it.

Your drafts are set as “private” and people can still see them, they just cannot download the files. This isn’t a bad thing if you want your followers to get an exclusive preview or sneak peek at things, but some folks like to keep private things actually private, as in, not seen by anyone without possession of that “direct link” security key thing.

Thankfully the site doesn’t auto-select any License either if you forget to assign one; it pops up a License selection window if you hit submit without choosing one; the ADHD in me is thankful for this feature existing; there have been numerous times when I forgot to assign the correct license to a model and the other sites slapped on whatever license they liked.

The Community is Accessible, but Quiet

This community seems to be made up of a lot of familiar creators you’ve seen on the other four sites.

There is a Community tab for you to see the latest posts, shared photos, videos, and a glance at the latest contests.

I have only been lurking on the site before, until I recently made an account to start engaging with it, and will provide more information once I have been there longer. Right now though, the community seems relatively quiet, even though it’s existed for quite some time.

Discoverability is Fair

The search feature and categories are good and people organically find my items and pages relatively well, though it seemed to be a lot slower than the other sites I’ve used. That was, however, until I inserted the “free” tag onto my free items; ever since doing that, the traffic the models get is about the same as all the other ones I upload to.

I have not yet encountered any fake models (a render of something, but the file ends up just being a cube).

So far GenAI has no foothold on the site; I find that I do not need to delve into a lot of pages before finding something I like, and the overall quality of the uploads is better too.

Theft is Low

Cuva Coins, generated like Prusameters or MakerPoints, are redeemed for different items. These include filaments, discount codes for the Creality store, and a handful of upgrade parts for the Creality K1 printer.

This site does not seem to suffer from model theft and junk models, which Makerworld and Printables suffer from horribly.

It has been proven that reward schemes like these attract model thieves. However, the rate at which you get Cuva Coins from model uploads is really low, and you actually obtain more coins just by visiting the site and sharing Makes. The rewards to trade Cuva Coins for are also very expensive, so it can take multiple months to obtain a single spool of filament. Because of this, Model Thieves make almost nothing, and thus cannot obtain free filaments or printers so easily.

The only real “exploit” I’ve seen is people sharing Makes of other people’s work on a model page that looks nothing like the final print, though more times than I care to count, this often ends up as simply an error on the user’s part.

There is a Verified Designer system in place, which means a designer’s account has been verified as legitimate by someone at Creality Cloud. This is a great idea for providing makers and other users some reassurance that the models uploaded to the account are genuine, though I don’t know if this impacts Cuva Coins or not.

Thangs

Needs a LOT of Work.

There are no limits to when you can start selling models, or how many you can put up for sale. You can provide models for free too, if you want. There is also an option for setting up a “Membership” plan, much like the Printables “Club” system, however, you need to have your account assessed by a Thangs admin to set up a Membership; all of these things are good, but there are notable problems when it comes to selling anything on this site.

First and foremost, there is absolutely nothing about fees. You have no clue how much Thangs is going to take. Thankfully, they utilise Stripe for payments as Printables does, but unlike Printables, they don’t automatically pay you your revenue; you must go to your account and request a payout manually.

There are also ZERO notifications about sales; if someone buys a model, you won’t know about it; you’ll only see someone downloaded the file. Another issue connected to this is the interface of the site, which doesn’t make it clear that your model is listed as “for sale” unless you log yourself out.

Presently, this makes utilising Thangs as a sales platform terrible; you can’t even see your sales in the analytics; it only shows likes, downloads, and views. THis area of the site needs serious work.

Uploading is Fair

When you upload a raw file, such as an STL, it will generate a render of it. Users can interact with the render if they click the rendered image.

No matter how much I looked, I couldn’t find an option to save a draft, so like with Cults3D be sure you have everything you need before uploading.

A negative of the upload process is the licensing; Thangs provides nothing. You need a text document with the license data in it, which you upload, and can then select from a drop-down menu during uploading. I find this very unusual, but I suppose it gives creators more flexibility to word their licenses how they want.

The Community is Creator-Heavy

Whilst I have seen plenty of Makers, as expected, the vast majority of the site is used by model creators. This is great for meeting other creators and sharing information about model-making and the like, but as a marketplace, this causes a bit of a problem; I and other model makers will rarely ever buy a model that we can make ourselves.

Discoverability is lacklustre

The search feature and categories are good, but traffic is really slow. Thangs is still a young site, so this could be why, but presently I’ve seen less than an eighth of the traffic I got from joining the other sites.

I have not yet encountered any fake models (a render of something, but the file ends up just being a cube).

So far GenAI has no foothold on the site; I find that I do not need to delve into a lot of pages before finding something I like, and the overall quality of the uploads is better too.

Stolen from here. Rarely Uploaded.

Putting it simply; Thangs has no rewards scheme, and you cannot sell models without a Stripe account, making it very difficult for minors to exploit the site. As for model thieves to sell stolen assets; with this site being so heavily creator-driven, these thieves get caught stupidly fast.

Whilst uploading of stolen models is really rare on Thangs, like with Thingiverse, a lot of models will get stolen from it.

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Conclusion