Today, we are happy to introduce a new plan: Sketchfab Plus. Many of you have been asking for a plan in between our Basic and Pro plans, both in terms of feature set and pricing. Sketchfab Plus boosts all features from the basic plan (like more annotations, larger file size, etc), while being very affordable at $7/month (paid annually, or $9 if paid monthly).
We are also making changes to our Basic plan: you will still benefit from unlimited uploads, as long as your models are available for download, either free (under a Creative Commons license), or on our Store. Models which are “view-only” (i.e., that you can’t download) will be capped to 1 upload per month for Basic users, 10 per month for Plus users, and 20 30 per month for Pro users. We are also introducing a credit system, which gives you upload credits when you turn view-only models into downloadable models. You can read more about our new capping rules in our Help Center.
Our vision is for Sketchfab to be the home for 3D models online, which means being the go-to place for both uploading and downloading 3D models. We believe that Sketchfab models are more useful for the community if they can also leave the platform and be used to build other projects. We are super grateful for the community – you have already contributed over 200,000 models available for free under creative commons, and over 60,000 models in our Store.
While those contributions are great, it is a small number compared to the more than 3,000,000 files published on Sketchfab, and we want to help make more of this content useful outside of Sketchfab. Content that is view-only is not usable in other projects by anyone but the author, and costs us money to host. As you know, advertising is not part of our business model, and the only way we make money is either through paid subscriptions or paid content. We think this model is more aligned with our creators first’ DNA. Other creative platforms like Vimeo or SoundCloud have adopted a similar approach, charging for professional tools and content in order to provide a great platform without depending on advertising, without polluting creative content with intrusive ads, and without making users pay for the service with their personal data.
We think this change is the best option for our creators and our community. It is also a change we need to make in order to keep building and improving Sketchfab for years to come. On top of giving you access to an advanced feature set, it means a lot to us that you are able to support the platform via a paid membership, and we thank you in advance for that. For more information, you can visit our Help Center.
Alban
Co-founder and CEO
Update September 26 – I have shared more insights into our decision making process on our forum.
About the author
Alban Denoyel
Co-founder and CEO of Sketchfab.
