Etsy charges 6.5%+ per sale. You keep 100%.

Etsy fees explained — and how much they cost you

Every Etsy digital sale incurs three separate fees. First, a $0.20 listing fee per item. Second, a 6.5% transaction fee on the total sale price. Third, payment processing through Etsy Payments at approximately 3% plus $0.25 per transaction. On a $10 STL file, that's roughly $1.00 going to Etsy before you see anything — over 10% of your listing price.

Proofly takes 0% from sellers. The buyer pays a small flat service fee instead of a percentage of the purchase price. Whether you sell one 3D model or one thousand, your take-home is always 100% of your listing price.

Etsy is built for handmade — Proofly is built for 3D files

Etsy's primary audience is handmade goods, vintage items, and craft supplies. Digital downloads are a secondary category — buyers searching Etsy for STL files compete with millions of listings unrelated to 3D printing. Discovery for niche formats like GLB, 3MF, or parametric CAD files is effectively zero.

Proofly is exclusively a 3D model marketplace. Every buyer is looking for a 3D file. Buyers can filter by format (STL / GLB / OBJ / 3MF), browse by category, and sort by print quality ratings. Your listing reaches the right audience without competing with candles and handmade earrings.

No 3D viewer on Etsy — buyers see images, not meshes

Etsy displays photos and static images uploaded by the seller. There is no interactive 3D preview — buyers cannot rotate the model, inspect topology, check watertightness, or verify scale before purchasing. For 3D print files, this creates real uncertainty: does the model print cleanly? What's the actual detail level? How complex is the geometry?

Proofly embeds a full in-browser WebGL 3D viewer on every listing. Buyers rotate, zoom, and inspect the actual mesh geometry before buying. This transparency reduces disputes and refund requests — especially for detailed miniatures, functional prints, and architectural models where geometry details matter.

HiddenMark™ — per-buyer watermarking Etsy doesn't have

Etsy has no per-buyer file fingerprinting for digital downloads. Every purchased STL or ZIP is a plain file — no buyer-specific protection. If your model gets shared in a Discord server or posted on a piracy site, you have no way to identify which buyer leaked it.

Proofly's HiddenMark system embeds a unique steganographic code per buyer directly into mesh geometry — not in file metadata that gets stripped by slicers and re-exporters. Each code is unique to the specific buyer and purchase.

When a file surfaces on a piracy site, upload it to proofly.store/hiddenmark and identify exactly which buyer it came from — in seconds. No other major marketplace for digital 3D files offers equivalent per-buyer forensic tracing.

Use both — they reach different buyer communities

Proofly doesn't require exclusivity, and neither does Etsy for digital sellers. You can list the same STL or 3MF files on both platforms. Etsy brings its existing general crafts audience; Proofly adds a focused 3D printing community with a better buyer experience (3D viewer) and better creator earnings (0% commission).

Many creators keep their Etsy store for the existing customer base while routing new 3D model listings through Proofly to avoid the 6.5%+ cut. The two platforms are complementary — you reach both audiences and earn more per sale on Proofly.