There are a few ways to monetize your 3D printing addicti hobby. You can design objects that others want to print, you can design and print things that others want to buy, you can print things that others want printed etc. Most of these are marginally profitable at best, but could be a way to help pay for a hobby and make a few bucks on the side.
Design
Thingiverse has a feature that allows you to tip designers that offer things that you find useful. Tipping is voluntary so the income is likely to be very small. I have quite a few designs on Thingiverse so I set up a paypal.me link and added it to my thingiverse user page. We’ll see if anything comes of it. Shapeways has a more conventional shop that will sell 3D prints of your designs and split some of the profit with you. I haven’t tried Shapeways out before but if I were to produce some designs that I thought had real commercial value that might be the way to go.
The other side of design is to sell your design expertise to others who need a part designed but don’t have the 3D CAD experience. This could be pretty lucrative if you have the right experience and the right contacts. In essence you would be selling your time and experience rather than your designs. This wouldn’t scale as well as a library of designs on Shapeways, but it might be more profitable anyway depending on your professional network.
Printing
Printing was quite lucrative for a short time when hobby 3D printer designs were just coming out and most people didn’t have access to a printer to print out the pieces necessary to build their own printer. It was a chicken and egg problem. At one time you could get hundreds of dollars for a set of printed parts to build a 3D printer. Those days are gone. Now anyone can buy a printer for that much and printed parts are priced low enough that I’m not sure how anyone makes money printing them. Same goes for printing random things off sites such as Thingiverse.
If you have some really creative designs that have no substitute you might be able to get a decent margin on printed parts. Otherwise you are likely going to have to do something more than just print parts to make decent money. For instance you won’t likely make much just printing parts to make a robot car or hexapod. Add in the motors and assembly and you may make a pretty decent amount. This is an idea I have played around with a bit.
I’ll be exploring the tipping economy on Thingiverse and perhaps do some hobby robotics designs to sell sometime in the near future. Stay tuned to see how it goes.
