On June 9th, 2026 at 11 AM Eastern time, the new owners of Thingiverse held a Q&A about the site going forward, and I’ve summarized it in this article!
Of course, full disclosure, I am not affiliated with Thingiverse and as such this is not an official recap by them; it’s just the notes I took while watching the recording myself. Accordingly, I may have missed things, so if you want to watch the recording yourself, you may do that [here]( Thingiverse Q&A - crowdcast ).
There’s lots of paraphrasing as well; I tried to condense the information I heard as objectively as possible. If you see me use quotes, that means I pulled quotes directly, and if you see parentheses, that’s generally me putting some editorial commentary in if I see that clarification or extra information is needed. Also, just know that if I wrote something as if it was a fact, that is because it was presented in the QnA as fact, not necessarily because it is, indeed, true.
So without further ado, let’s jump in!
Host intros:
Romain Kidd, CEO, and Arys Andreou, CTO
Format: 20 minutes of announcements of what they’ve been doing and what they’re planning, and then jump into QnA.
New faces on staff:
Luis–Community Management
Nessim–Senior Back-end Engineer
Dima–Senior Front-End Developer
Dmitry–Senior Backend Engineer
The idea of onboarding these folks is to increase their capacity to add features to the platform.
New features on the site:
A forum for people to talk about Thingiverse even when there’s no live QnA. Intended for people to host feedback for Thingiverse, and will be used to pitch new ideas for Thingiverse. You can sign up in one click to make an account that links to your Thingiverse account.
CERN Open Hardware V2.0 Licenses are now available for use on the site. It was implemented because a creator contacted them directly and requested the feature.
Since February, they’ve spent 100s of hours contacting a bunch of people both using the site and those that are related to the field of engineering and making in order to gather info on how to best move forward.
Overall, they’re focusing Thingiverse on supporting Open Hardware.
New Tagline: Thingiverse - The Community for OpenSource Hardware, since 2008
Mission is: “Empowering Communities with the value-added tools and services to create and distribute enduring Hardware Projects in harmony with our values.”
“From a Spark to a physical object”
The idea is to allow people to have ideas to find people to collaborate with, people to help with it and potentially crowdfund it.
From the slide:
"1. Idea & Team Building
Post and [sic] idea, find collaborators
2.Validate & Fund
Crowdfund, find Sponsors
3. Collaborate
Build ambitious Projects together
4. Project Page
Project pages live and grow
5. Manufacturing
Bring the Projects to real life"
They don’t want to be just a project gallery; they want to actively support creators in creating things for the platform.
They then show a rough mockup of what a Project Page may look like, which was unfortunately very much compressed by the crowdcast platform:
Open hardware is a broad term, so they have some specific categories here:
Not all of these categories will receive a lot of support right away, but the first one they want to support is Spare Parts.
About 5% of the models on Thingiverse are Spare Parts, but they’re poorly organized. They want to try and organize Thingiverse in such a way that you can find parts you’re looking for by which device they’re for.
“Become a Thingiverse Supporter”
One thing they wanted to launch before this AMA was the paid membership; in order to address the big complaints about ads while still remaining profitable, you can pay a monthly membership ($4.16 a month if you pay the yearly one), which allows you to browse completely ad free and get a badge. This is essentially the first time Thingiverse has accepted payments directly, so it took a while to implement.
They want to stress:
“Everything Remains free”
They are NOT launching a file store, they are NOT paywalling content, and they DO want to focus on free content–both free for people to tinker with, and free to download. They did receive feedback and requests for some creators to be able to sell models there, but that is not the direction they want to take Thingiverse.
They also mentioned that there also will be no patreon-esque subscription service (presumably where you subscribe to a creator and that gets you access to exclusive models), but they are planning on implementing a sponsor-esque subscription, which will be talked about later.
On that note, they still want to support projects and their creators to make sure it’s sustainable.
Just because the models will be free, it doesn’t mean that creators aren’t able to make money.
They also talked about reviewing the tipping model. It’s currently a nice idea, but it’s a pain to go through a 3rd party website to do that, so it doesn’t happen a lot.
The creator sponsor subscription and crowdfunding are their first areas of focus.
They also provided a roadmap:
The Download History allows you to see what you have downloaded from the site, which you oddly couldn’t do before.
The Manufacturers Map allows you to see what facilities are available to commission to print things for you. They also want to eventually integrate it with the planned projects pages to allow people to commission the help of those with printers.
If you are a manufacturing company and want to reserve your spot on the map today, you may do so via this QR code:
Eventually they plan to create special Manufacture Profiles for Manufacturers.
Design Challenges
Thingiverse has been going through with creating Design Challenges that allows people to participate in making a model based off of a certain theme within a certain time. Currently a Raspberry Pi contest is finishing up, and soon an IKEA hacks one will be live. There are prizes involved! Someone suggested a Voron contest for example; they’re listening to suggestions if anyone has them for the future!
To sum everything up, they’re trying to shift Thingiverse’s focus onto getting open source projects off the ground.
And now for the QnA!
Chatters are allowed to go up on stage and ask the questions directly, and/or ask them in the chat.
Q. About the team: how has the team changed going forward? (I’m not sure which question specifically from the chat they’re trying to answer here)
A: The general idea has been to increase the team and change it to increase capacity to redevelop the site while also keeping costs down.
Q: Is there any plan to allow users to conveniently download models on their phones?
A: An app isn’t on our roadmap now, but if you want one, let us know! There is a mobile version of the site, but it’s not ideal. Especially with the ads.
Q: For collaboration on the Project Pages, who controls which changes are to be made? How do we prevent two people from overwriting each other’s changes?
A: Rather than a collaborative Google Sheets, it’s more like a Github, where people can track which file replaces an old one. Similar to the world of coding, but maybe not tracking every specific change. We definitely need to work more to figure out the specifics.
Q: Did the number of engineers go up on the team?
A: No, our head count didn’t go up, but our capacity did, which I think is what’s important.
Q: Is there a way to conveniently post makes from mobile without a dedicated app?
A: Some things are definitely broken. I personally have a backlog of images I can’t upload because of the way it messes with the format. Makes are one of the simplest ways to reward a creator, so we want to make it much easier to post makes even on mobile. There is some legacy code that needs to be upgraded/rethought as well. If an app can be made quickly, maybe it will be through an app, or it might be through the site itself as well.
Q: If Thingiverse is going to be a “Engineering-focused LinkedIn,” is there going to be a timeline feed where people can post updates to the project that people following them could see?
A: I can’t answer on exactly what the Project Pages will look like, but we want to do that sort of thing as well as making it easy to see what each person has worked on via their profile.
Q: “Why on earth does thingiverse need to share my data with more than 1000 partners? I know you need ad money, but that’s completely absurd.”
A: That’s all managed by our partners, so I can’t tell you the details of why it’s 1000 partners. That’s all due to the ad suppliers.
Q: Why are you taking things away from the community? (unsure as to what they’re referring to)
A: We don’t want to take away things from the community; we want to add things–like how we’re adding the option of going ad-free.
Q: I built an AI-powered 3D model generator, and I know that Thingiverse has been hesitant about designs. If it empowers creators, would you be willing to collaborate with me?
A: When we acquired and rebranded the platform, we launched it with the anti-AI stance that was very well received. AI is everywhere; you see it on platforms like SolidWorks and Google, so we want to create a platform specifically for human creativity and not robots. There’s no value in making a platform for agents, especially since it reduces the value of the human creators. We don’t want a tool that can automatically generate content.
Q: How do you view Thingiverse as a competitor to MakerWorld, and what overlapping markets do you see that you want to fight MakerWorld for?
A: I don’t open MakerWorld everyday; they’re doing their own thing, and we’re doing ours. I believe making a site specifically for hosting collaborative projects is different from what they’re doing, although I’m not exactly familiar with what their goal is. Overall, I also feel that it’s more ambitious than what they’re doing–focusing on engineering as a whole rather than making models for a specific set of machines.
Q: I like Thingiverse as it is, nice and simple. Is there any plan to improve the search function? I keep seeing the same models over and over.
A: Like I mentioned when talking about Spare Parts, we want to make it so that you can specifically search for, say, what car you have, whittle down to only the relevant models, and then go from there. We want to do something similar for other categories as well.
Q: How can people create communities to interact with each other?
A: We currently have Groups on the platform, but it’s poorly implemented. A lot of people want a better version though. When Project Pages launch, we want to understand how people want to use them to communicate both internally on the project as well as externally to people not working on the project–whether we want to implement Forums or Discord there as well.
Q: Dark Mode?
A: We’re working on it, but there’s still legacy code to be updated. We should be on track with it, though.
Q: Thingiverse will be miles ahead of MakerWorld if it continues to just not require a login to download files. (This wasn’t a question, of course, but still)
A: I see there’s 11 likes on that comment, so I wanted to address it. No plans to force login to download. Again, we’re not planning on limiting or taking away from the experience at all.
Q: Have you reached out to OrcaSlicer to help them compete with other slices that embed websites into their slicer?
A: Given how OrcaSlicer is open source, and if users want it, then working with them definitely makes sense. I haven’t reached out yet.
Q: Tell me what happened; I just got here
A: This will be recorded! Don’t worry. (Plus a certain dashing pumpkin will be writing up a summary!)
Q: On the topic of new licenses, could you add the Opinionated Queer License? It prohibits use for bigoted purposes or perpetuating human rights violations.
A: I don’t know about this a lot; maybe you can email us about it and we can look into it to see if it works out for Thingiverse.
Q: Any plan to bring back the “Popular This Month” instead of the “Popular in the Last 7 Days”? It feels like the system is being gamed.
A: One of the first things we did was add a carousel to the site and change it from the last month to the last week to keep things fresher. I haven’t noticed the system being gamed; they seem to be consistently quality models.
Q: There have been talks of microtransactions–I’m a bit wary; why is this necessary? Ad revenue too low?
A: There will be new monetization features, but they’re all optional. If you want to browse Thingiverse for free with ads, you will continue to be able to do that. The community was very clear about not wanting microtransactions.
Q: Will it be possible to put more than 20 models on one page? Is there also an ability to block certain designers?
A: As we go forward and rethink the Thingiverse categories, thinking about how you can customize what kinds of things you want to see on your feed is definitely something we want to do.
Q: I work in the TTRPG scene, but MyMiniFactory’s monetization scheme put me off. How will folks be able to make money on Thingiverse?
A: As we mentioned, we’re going to redo tipping, as well as implement sponsoring creators and crowdfunding
Q: Any plan to overhaul notifications? It seems to be a giant list of just people liking and collecting my designs. I want a way to sort through which notifications I want to see, since I’m interested in comments and other things I can interact with.
A: Not something specifically we’ve looked into, but we definitely can.
Q: I’ve had issues uploading designs for Lasercutting, but uploading an SVG just has it show up as one of the format images.
A: We definitely want more Laser cutting projects going forward, but honestly as 3D printing specialists it’s something we need to learn more about. Could you send us some of your projects so we can see what the issue is in detail?
Q: The thumbnails on Thingiverse look really blurry comparatively to other sites. Any plans on addressing this?
A: It’s on our list; the image resizer is not optimal. It is currently being worked on. We definitely know about that, and it’s gotten a bit worse recently, so it’s on the list.
Q: Any plans on redoing how tags work? They take forever to load when assigning them.
A: Not entirely sure on that; I’d have to get more information about it.
Q: Any plans to put badges/achievements on profiles?
A: Some gamification might be good, but maybe not too much. We need to understand what people want. Maybe sponsoring a specific creator gets you access to their specific badges. Right now, ad-free users have a little diamond badge. We’re thinking about that especially when we redo the profiles.
Q: Is it possible to upgrade the ad-free membership from monthly to yearly, and can you cancel it easily?
A: Yes, and yes.
Q: If your Tagline is “Dare to be Human,” why did you remove the Instagram and TikTok reels that focus on the developers behind the scenes?
A: We try to be open and do QnAs like this to get a direct line of communication between us and the users, and making videos for an algorithm just isn’t one of our priorities. Our first platform we want to focus on is Thingiverse.
Q: Will we have a map with where makerspaces, manufacturers, etc are located? Is there a plan to have them pay to feature themselves?
A: As we mentioned, we will, and there will be a small fee, mostly to serve as a filter to prevent a person with an 8-year-old Ender 3 trying to register as a Manufacturer.
Q: What is the % Thingiverse will take for Crowdfunding?
A: Unsure, but the way I see it, there are incomes for Thingiverse–Ad-free is money for Thingiverse. But for things like Crowdfunding, the vast majority will go to the creators. We’ve always made it fair for creators of the projects.
Q: “I don’t really care about tips (for myself), but maybe it would be an idea to be able to tip on certain feature requests and then I could tell my fans to just tip those feature requests? 100% going to thingiverse development”
A: If I understand correctly (he doesn’t), you’re saying people could tip on suggestions for projects–say, someone comments to make something longer on a model, and people tip to support that change being made. I think that makes sense for the collaborative nature of projects.
~Follow–up answer later: With feature requests, take them to the forum.
Q: Could we do a request system?
A: We’ve seen the forum being used for folks posting design requests. The idea is not for Thingiverse to become a freelancer website, but there could be aspects of that.
Q: Plans for free cookies?
A: Not planned, but I guess you can 3D print them. Maybe open source cookie recipes on Thingiverse.
Q: Plans to add projects that are being worked on?
A: We are using the forums for that, and I would encourage you to sign up for the newsletter to push info about cool projects and updates to the site. Newsletter can be found at the bottom of the main site; just enter your email and hit “Subscribe.”
Q: Any plans to offer prolific creators a free ad-free version?
A: Since this is the first time Thingiverse offers something of value, we have to think about how we want to reward creators. We don’t want to overgamify it by having people earn centimeters of filament as reward, but ad-free might be something we do. We’d have to look into how to prevent the system from being gamed so we don’t end up with 500 cookie cutters flooding the main page.
Q: Thoughts on a weekly livestream to show off cool projects on the site, and for people to present their projects?
A: Could be cool, and we could also do that on the forums. We definitely want to continue this and we might do other lives for presenting big changes to the site as well, like in the case of Spare Parts.
Q: Can we upload videos?
A: You can embed them into the description (this is news to me; links are clickable but don’t create embeds like in Printables or MakerWorld), but that might be something we could add to Project Pages.
Final thoughts; Feel free to talk contact the hosts if you have any questions/comments/suggestions:
Romain Kidd @thingiro
CEO
Arys Andreou @aandreou
CTO
Also, you may post anything to the forums as well; they are often perused by the upper management.
That’s it, and thanks for reading! Hope you all found it to be useful.
~Carl