How we make money. (Today: we don't.)
Every marketplace pitch earns the same question — what's the catch? This page answers it before you have to ask.
Our cut of every order
0%
No listing fees. No subscription. No commission. Makers set their own prices and keep every dollar of them; customers pay the maker's price and nothing more. That's the whole pricing page.
This isn't a launch promo
We're not waiving a fee until you're hooked — there is no fee, and none is planned for years. The mission is a maker in every town, and the fastest way to kill that is to tax a hobbyist's $12 bracket. Small local jobs only stay worth doing if nobody is skimming them, so the 0% is structural, not promotional.
How we can afford that
By running almost embarrassingly lean. Assista3d is built and operated by one person. The site is static hosting plus a small database — monthly infrastructure costs less than a couple rolls of filament. The expensive parts of a marketplace (quoting, pricing, dispatch) are automated software, not staff. There's no office, no paid advertising, and — most importantly — no venture investors who need a return on a deadline. A business with almost no costs doesn't need to extract revenue to survive. It can wait.
How we might make money someday
Honestly: we're not sure yet, and we're not pretending otherwise. The candidates — none built, none promised:
- Optional paid tools for makers who want more — think pro storefront features or business-grade extras. Opt-in, never required to receive jobs.
- Services for business customers with recurring or high-volume orders, priced for businesses.
What we won't do
- A cut of the standard order between a customer and a maker.
- Selling maker or customer data. Ever.
- Pay-to-win placement — dispatch routes by distance and reputation, and money will never change that.
And if the model ever changes: announced openly, in advance, never retroactively.
Why this survives where 3D Hubs' model didn't
3D Hubs built this exact idea first — local makers, local pickup — and proved people want it. We say that with genuine respect: right idea, wrong economics, wrong decade. As a venture-funded company it needed a commission on every order, and commissions on small hobbyist jobs couldn't carry a venture-scale business. In October 2018 it pivoted to professional manufacturing partners, and today it thrives inside Protolabs serving industrial customers.
We copied the growth playbook and inverted the economics: no investors, near-zero fixed costs, 0% take. The model that killed the community network was a requirement of their funding — and we simply don't have that requirement. The full story is on our 3D Hubs comparison page.
If it earns nothing, it cost nothing
A free storefront, an instant-quote link, a printable QR flyer, and jobs routed from your own town — with a 0% platform fee behind all of it.
Questions, answered
See how we compare, honestly
Including the parts where the other platform wins.