Federico P.
They value their interests a lot more then their designers
I am a designer and seller on the platform, I started in 2021 and it was amazing fixed comission at 80% possibility to get paid via wire and the project section filled with interesting projects. Nowadays, it has become terrible, they are actively working against us designers and against the clients. First of all, there isn't a fixed commission fee, but it depends on your annual income. It's really terrible, new deisgners get 65% which is robbery, and it goes up to 85% but you need to earn something like 300k/yr which probably is only possible through working with a big studio. And if you are a big studio, you should not be working on CGTrader, but you should certainly have your own website. In terms of SEO it is fine, but could be better, it helps a lot to make fake discounts, and that's what the platform suggest. You increase the price and attivate the discount of 30%. It's really cringy, I really hate it, but I can't afford not doing it, otherwise all the competitors will destroy my shop in terms of SEO on the platform and google. You can only get paid with a terrible platform which is Hyperwallet with terrible exchange rates (at least you lose 3% of your income on their rates) + CGTrader on each sales charge you a hidden fee because I think they use paypal from what I understood, so you lose another 3.5-4.5% on that. I was threaten with a ban on their platform, if I did not remove all my social (instagram handle) from my profile, because they don't want to publicize you in any way or form. On that I might add, that in the TOS there's not a written rule yet, you just receive a threat of removing all your social on 48h or you'll get a ban. CRINGE. Remember when I said it was full of cool projects, well, nowadays the project section for freelance is full of spam and cringy underpaid projects. Not only they are underpaid, but until last year they took 5% of commission on the project, nowadays they increased it to 15%. Now to explain it to who does not work on SEO, or with data centres, that's Stealing money. They do not keep the files internally first of all, second they do not help you reach the client, thirdly they do not provide you with any additional service that might justify a commission like that (especially if you consider that on projecta as well, you lose the other hidden fees that I said eariler, so hyperwallet and their paypal fees). I'm a big shop, and I am trying to slowly move away from them. It's embarassing. They added a lot of useless staff for example some weird AI both to look for models and to design stuff, but both are not even good. I hope they regain their senses, because either us designers need to move away from the platform or all the client will get increased prices. One other weird stuff, but that's a small issue in comparison to the rest of what I said, I once published a 3D printable replica of a gun from star wars. It was a replica, clearly not a working gun, so no mechanism inside, nothing. The algorithm sospended the model and when I explained the situation to the staff, they responded with "you cannot publish real guns". I won't comment on that, I just laughed about it, because that's the qualification of their staff. Another time, they took down a 3D model manually because "it depicted a real gun", it was a replica of Caitlyn Shotgun Pool party skin which I would dare you to look online, it's like a toy gun for kids at the beach. I don't know what else to say they value their interests a lot more then they value both their clients and their deisgners. Oh another thing, go check their best designers section, it is full of weird account, no sales, thousands of designs published daily, no views. It is really weird, it's years that every time I check it, it's full of weird accounts like that. Simple fixes: - remove all that paypal and hyperwallet stuff and go back to wire, like all the other sites do. - return to a fixed payment commission (20% for models and 5% for projects) - remove all that weird AI stuff, which is just confusing - stop trying to make everyone uses fake prices and fake discounts - let designers sponsor their socials - make a weekly manual check of the best designers section I hope to see these things fixed, because I loved this platform in 2021, and now it has become a real mess.