Meanwhile, it looks like some people are crawling and indexing Thingiverse, perhaps to use its data to start new competitors. The site is at times painfully slow and you get a lot of errors when using it. The site has a lot of time outs and crashes. A photo upload issue has not been resolved. There have been continuing issues with the renderings not displaying. Log in issues took a long time to be resolved. Load times have gone to a few minutes per page and the site has had bugs that seem to not be solved for months. Spam and other undesirable content continue to at times not be moderated. Some social media accounts haven’t been updated for months. Thingiverse chugs along but kind of like the Flying Dutchman sailing the oceans without a crew doomed to continue a never-ending journey. For the past year however it been awfully quiet on Thingiverse. Thingiverse has over two million registered users and has had more than 340 million downloads.Īfter Stratasys bought Makerbot the firm invested in Thingiverse, making an education version, an improved API, integrations with others, upload tools and adding functionality. Thingiverse has become like a tax on 3D printing. Even users who by now don’t like the platform still use it very often. Yes, of course, you can search on other repositories but more things will still be on Thingiverse. Yes, you could try Pinshape, Youmagine or Minifactory but you’ll still get the most downloads, comments, and attention on Thingiverse. Because it has the most users and the most files it has inertia and people keep publishing on it. Even with an Autodesk Instructables plugging at the problem Thingiverse still remains the largest by far. Dozens of other platforms imitated Thingiverse but none manage to come anywhere near its installed base.

No longer loved, the platform still has an unassailable lead in files though. A select few had ridden the open-source popularity wave and essentially used to the community for their own gain without giving back. When the Makerbot team started to patent things its community had made and subsequently turned its back on open source, Thingiverse took a hit. In my idealism, Thingiverse could become the one tool that would let us all stand on the shoulders of giants. We could all work together to make all of the things better. One central file repository for the entire 3D printing community, what a brilliant idea! Open source ideas and files could be exchanged for free by anyone. Sadly they weren’t interested in selling it to me.įor a long time, I thought that Thingiverse was the smartest thing in 3D printing. After being asked to write about it I decided to grab the bull by the horns and reached out to Makerbot. If you are a 3D printer operator you probably have noticed that Thingiverse sucks at the moment.

Thingiverse free