ArtStation and 3D printing: the gap Proofly fills
ArtStation was acquired by Epic Games in 2021 and its marketplace was merged into Fab in 2023–2024. Throughout its history, ArtStation focused on digital art portfolios and game-ready assets — character models, textures, environment art, and plugins. It never developed meaningful support for 3D print formats (STL, 3MF) or the maker/designer community.
If you create print-ready 3D models, miniatures, mechanical parts, or architectural prints, ArtStation was simply not designed for you. Fab inherits that gap. Proofly is built specifically for this market: print-ready formats, per-buyer HiddenMark watermarking, and an in-browser 3D viewer so buyers inspect geometry before buying.
0% commission vs ArtStation's 35%+ history
At its peak, ArtStation charged 30% from every sale — creators kept 70%. During promotional periods or for certain asset types, effective fees reached 35–40%. Even after the Fab migration brought fees down to 12%, that still means $120 taken from every $1,000 earned. Over a year of 100 sales/month on a $10 model, that is $1,500 paid to the platform — for files you created.
Proofly collects nothing from sellers. Instead, the buyer pays a small flat service fee per order ($1 USD equivalent). Your listing price is your full income from sale 1 to sale 10,000. On the same 100 sales/month at $10: you earn $1,000/month on Proofly vs $875 on Fab — $1,500/year more, without changing your prices.
HiddenMark — per-buyer tracing ArtStation does not offer
ArtStation and Fab have no per-buyer file fingerprinting. Every download is a plain model file with no buyer-specific identifier. If a buyer shares your model in a free Discord or piracy forum, you have no technical way to identify them — only manual DMCA requests that take weeks.
Proofly's HiddenMark system embeds a unique steganographic code into the mesh geometry of every paid download — different for every buyer and every purchase. If a file leaks, upload it to proofly.store/hiddenmark to identify the source in seconds. No DMCA needed. No detective work. The watermark is invisible to the eye and survives common mesh edits.