I've been lurking on the forums here for a long time, I thought I'd answer some questions posed here, as I used to have a "shop" at Shapeways.
It is possible that the liquidation trustees may put a value on the designer contacts dataset for somebody who wants to take a shot at being an IP broker. We have no (easy) way of knowing that. Maybe the folks here with (formerly) active SW shops like John ( @Lemosteam ) can keep us up on this. He and the others are about to be on the receiving end of a flurry of lawyer mailings because they are known creditors.
The website is still up, but apparently the shops database is offline now.
Nobody really knows anything yet, not even former Shapeways employees. It's way too early for that. Shapeways had a plant in NYC and in The Netherlands, both are apparently separate entities, each handled by the bankruptcy court in their own country. I've heard the dutch SW company would like to go for a restart, if you read between the lines they blame the bad management in NYC for the poor results and they think they can be profitable.
In all seriousness, as basically a middle-man entity, Shapeways was going to go out of business eventually - best-case scenario, everyone would have their own 3-D printers and they would be rendered obsolete. We're not quite at that stage yet, but it's clear that their business model isn't sustainable.
I don't entirely agree with you. They started out as printing for consumers and businesses, but they seem to have judged that consumer sales were not profitable enough, or would go the way you predict with the advent of cheap good printers for home-use. They started focusing on business-to-business and lost sight of the consumer side of things. But I think they had way too many staff and were constantly aiming too high, whilst cutting costs on quality. And in the B2B side of things there's plenty of opportunity, but now also plenty of competition.
A significant difference between Shapeways and Thingverse or Cults is that with Shapeways the buyer doesn't have access to the STL files, so the designer keeps their intellectual property intact. Though since I never uploaded a design to Shapeways or read the fine print, if I upload a file to them, who actually owns the file? The designer, or Shapeways?
The designer retains the IP.
I just assumed it was profit. They were a start up with around $10 million from investors to get going. Back around 2018 when they jacked everything up I read it was because the start up money was running out and they needed to turn around and start making a profit for the investors.
From what I gather, this was indeed the case. But their methods of turning the business profitable did not work out in the end.
Well, i have to imagine the original owners of shapeways were paid by the acquisition company and sailed happily off into the sunset. After that you are dealing with corporate structure who may or may not have any idea about how to run such an organization.
Not sure on what happened there, I think the acquisition company was just the fastest and easiest way to go public. Shapeways saw they needed cash since they consistently lost money, and that was the route to gain some investment.
https://i.materialise.com/en
Has anyone had any experience using these guys as an alternative to shapeways? I'm not so concerned with resin prints as I am quite content with my Sonic mini 8k, but am looking for a new supplier for metal prints, particularly one where I can set up a passive shop.
I have used them, just not for steel. The quality is equal to Shapeways, prices differ sometimes but generally are in the same ballpark. If you plan to sell there's a big "but". You can only sell something that you have ordered and was printed. I've tried some items that sold well on Shapeways, but I've only had one sale I believe. So the investment definitely wasn't worth it for me. Don't get me wrong, I do this for fun and to add to the hobby. It doesn't have to get me a profit, but I'm not throwing my money away just to enhance the hobby for others.
