Make Custom 3D-Printed Designs Worth Your Time

Designing 3D-printed parts for yourself isn't usually worth the $$$ value of your time. It CAN, however, be financially viable if you share & use creatively.

While not everything is about making money, for me it’s hard to separate my hobby (making things) with my work (technical writing, engineering, and… making things). The question for me then becomes: “When I design custom 3D-printed things, is this a worthwhile pursuit for?”

The short answer might appear to be “no” on the surface. Maybe even an emphatic explicative + no. The real answer, however, is more complicated.

Design < Buy in Pure $$$ Terms

Consider my portfolio of 3D-printed thingies, found here on Thingiverse. If the equivalent of any of these things was available and I were to buy them, I’d expect the average price would be in the $5 ballpark. Correspondingly, I’ve spent in the ballpark of five hours on each printed design. So at Florida’s current minimum wage of $14/hour I’ve spent $70 on the design + (ballpark) $1 on filament and power.¹

So $71, or 14.2 Biggie Bags, based on their now-obsolete $5 standard. Or, coincidentally, 14.2 times as much as just buying something if I minimally valued my time. Not great.

3D-Share > Not 3D-Share

I have 61 models available as of this writing. 61 models x $70 = $4270 of my time that I spent on these, a rather bad deal if the equivalent purchased price works out to $305. However, consider that my models have been downloaded 2,263 times, and if we assume that every one of those models is printed, my time cost per print drops to $1.88.

Of course, I am seriously undervaluing my time in this example, and I get no direct monetary benefit for my individual design time. However, as a whole, the 3D-printing community (including me) does get a huge amount of benefit from designs being available.

Consider that while I may use my design once, I also print quite a few things that someone else designed. I also use open source software a lot (e.g. KiCad, LibreOffice). This isn’t exactly the same thing, but it certainly counts as part of the information sharing/design economy.

I didn’t design this Ryobi battery holder, but it worked out really well for my needs

You and I don’t have to contribute, but it seems like a good thing to do.

Exactly What You Want for Increased Productivity

Indirectly — and more nebulously, one might say — stuff I design for my office and workspace helps be do things better and faster, thus allowing me to make more money. Have these pursuits increased my productivity by $4270 over time? Actually, I think it might if you take everything into account. Though again, that’s grossly undervaluing my time.

Alternatively, could off-the-shelf solutions get me, say, $3000 of the way there? Maybe, but there’s also some joy involved in optimizing something to do exactly what you want. I could also argue that making such designs sharpens my engineering skills and makes me better at jobs that do directly pay.

Advertising, Direct Sales, sponsorship for actual $$$ Profit

Personal use, and possibly giving some designs away, is where 3D-printed pursuits stop for most people. However, in addition to increasing your productivity, there are ways to make this more directly profitable than by solely improving your life/what comes around goes around. A few ideas, some of which I pursue:

• Advertise Your Web Presence - If a lot of people go to site X to download your designs, if there’s a link to your other content… a newsletter, for instance, they might check it out. It’s certainly a low percentage, but this probably helps with SEO as well.

• Sell your stuff directly - I maintain a store on Tindie, where I mostly sell electronic thingies that I’ve designed. I also have these 3D-printed avocado seed floats for sale, though I’ve only had one order so far. YRMV.

• License Your Design - Hopefully I can talk about this in more depth later, but I recently licensed one of my designs for another company’s use. In theory, this is great, since you don’t have to worry about warehousing etc.

• Sponsorship on Printables et al - You can set up your Printables profile to allow people to support you, if you have obtained a level 18 status or greater and have at least 150 followers. You can also ask for an exception if you think you deserve it for some reason.
  -I supported Mikolas Zuza for a short time in order to build a Hackstercaster derivative that I was getting paid for.²
  -You can also earn “free” filament on Printables. This is nice, but hardly worth the effort required.
  -FWIW, I’m at level 20, but have only 15 followers!

The Prusameters reward system is a nice thought, but isn’t something that will allow you to quit your day job.

Need help? Don’t want to model things yourself?

I’ve made some rather conflicting arguments here about whether or not you should make your own 3D-printed designs. At the end of the day, if you enjoy it you can probably justify the pursuit if you share designs and/or make a direct profit. If you’re not a 3D-modeling person and still want to contribute to the world of free engineering stuff, there are lots of other open-source outlets that might be more appropriate for your skills and interests (again, e.g., KiCad, LibreOffice).

Obi Wan seemed ancient when I fist watched this. Like, how is he still upright? Now he just seems old… and maybe probably homeless. If I live long enough, perhaps he will look like a youngster. Hopefully I’ll still be designing stuff.

IF you need something made, and either don’t have sufficient CAD skills to get it done, or if you just don’t want to bother with it, well I know a guy. That’s right, I’m the guy. And yes, we can negotiate my rate in Biggie Bagz👇 Though they’re $6 now. Or maybe $4. Also I do a lot of technical writing. Like what you see here, but generally a bit more serious in tone. Get in touch if I can help you with anything: hi@jeremyscook.com, leave a comment, or just reply back to this email if that’s how you’re reading this. -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1. Not factoring in the capital expense of the printer itself.

2. In this case, I got reimbursed for supporting this creator. So “I supported” is sort of inaccurate. Since people are sharing designs openly (not trade secrets) and there is generally no patent on such designs, legally you’re probably free to use functional designs however you want. OTOH, one might be able to claim copyright protection for at least some of the design elements.

That said, I am not a lawyer. If it costs $5 a month or whatever to sell someone else’s design, it’s probably safest, and certainly more polite to do so — even if it would be absurdly impractical for the designer to enforce any alleged infringement.