CommunityCAD
How CommunityCAD makes money
Every revenue stream, stated plainly.
CommunityCAD is free to browse, free to upload to, and free to download from, within the daily and weekly limits. Running it costs real money: servers, storage, rendering every model, and search. Here is every way the site pays for itself. Nothing is hidden in the fine print.
The short version#
| Source | Who pays | What CommunityCAD gets |
|---|---|---|
| Memberships | Members who choose a paid tier | The monthly price |
| Donation platform fee | The donor, on top of the donation | $0.50 or 5% of the donation, whichever is more |
| Ads | Advertisers | What the ad pays; only Free-tier and signed-out visitors see ads |
That's the whole list. There are no affiliate links, we don't sell or rent your data, and creators keep 100% of the amount a donor chooses to give them.
Memberships#
Paid tiers (Supporter, Believer and Professional) are monthly subscriptions that raise your download limits and remove ads. They're billed by CommunityCAD through Stripe. See Membership tiers for prices, limits, and the free ways to earn a tier.
The donation platform fee#
When you donate to a creator, you pay three amounts, all shown to you before you pay:
- The donation, which goes to the creator in full;
- the platform fee, $0.50 or 5% of the donation, whichever is more, which goes to CommunityCAD;
- card processing, which covers Stripe's charge (2.9% + $0.30) so it doesn't come out of the creator's share.
See Donations for worked examples.
Ads#
Ads keep the site free for people who don't pay. They are:
- Clearly marked. Every ad card carries a "Sponsored" label.
- Limited. On search results, one card in every nine is an ad. The home page, model pages, profiles and company pages show at most one or two ad slots, in the sidebar or between sections.
- Only for some visitors. Signed-out visitors and members on the Free tier see ads. Any tier above Free sees none, however you got it: paid, earned by uploading, or earned by donating.
Most ads are sponsored listings that CommunityCAD sells and places itself, such as a company promoting its parts library. When none are running, the slot may show a Google AdSense ad instead. Google can use cookies to choose those ads; the Privacy Policy explains this and how to opt out of personalised ads.
To advertise on CommunityCAD, email contact@communitycad.dev.
What we don't do#
- We don't sell, rent or trade personal data.
- We don't take a cut of the amount you give a creator.
- We don't charge to upload, to download within the limits, or to receive donations.
- We don't put models behind a paywall. Every public model can be downloaded on the Free tier.