Industry News Shapeways goes bankrupt

[Marshal Mittens]

I used them a bit. 

 

Very expensive and the last few orders had very gritty casts under the wax side. Like it was very gritty material. Customer support was not helpful.

 

I can understand what happened. 

[Orange Knight]

I never used them, personally.

 

Still, it's a shame to see a business fail, and for people to lose their 

[Noserenda]

Ahha, they are indeed apparently bankrupt, but got the website back up to essentially scam some poor suckers before they fully go under :/ 

[Halandaar]

Can't say I'm surprised given the rise of domestic 3d printing (and the associated proliferation of people offering that as a service).

 

Combine that with Shapeways pushing it's own customers away with frankly ridiculous shipping costs and the writing was on the wall really. The main concern is whether the artists who used Shapeways as their main provider/revenue stream can get their designs onto other marketplaces.

[Marshal Reinhard]

Early adopters aren't neccessarily always the best for a given task. Given that the competition has pretty much exploded since they started, this more or less just sounds like captialism working as intended.

Edited July 5 by Marshal Reinhard

[twopounder]

Very unsurprising. I had a shop on there, but trying to optimize the models to make them affordable was very annoying. The prices were extremely high and the detail was mediocre. I never went back to see if they added resin options. When I was doing it, FUD was the best option and it was still very grainy and could have a lot of stepping.

 

Still, they did get a lot of people interested in 3d modelling and served a purpose back when the best a home printer could do was puke out extremely low definition terrain.