There’s a growing number of people making their living from 3D printing, and now cloud service MakerOS by Manulith can make life a lot easier.
While many 3D printing cloud startups seem to be focusing on the hobbyist market and low-level technology pieces, there’s a much more lucrative group that should be considered: professional 3D designers. These are highly skilled professional engineers and designers who produce complex unique designs and prototypes for industry.
But in doing so, there’s a lot more to do than simply design and printing of prototypes. A relationship must be established and professionally maintained between the designer and client. This ends up to be a number of administrative and collaborative activities that can be quite inefficiently performed if not managed properly.
MakerOS attempts to solve these issues by largely automating them using a cloud-based platform. Here’s a short list of their major features:
- Interactive chat and VOIP with clients
- Cloud storage of 3D models and project materials
- 3D Viewer of models (for use by designer and client)
- Project quoting
- Invoicing
- Group features and asset sharing
- Project management
- Activity reporting
Use of the service is mostly at no charge: you pay only when a financial transaction is made, at which time MakerOS scores 3% of the transaction value.
Who can use this service? We think it could be anyone in the 3D printing business that has clients and is of small to medium sized, which could include a lot of people.
There’s one catch: the service is only in closed beta at the moment, and it’s not clear when it will become open to the public. Request a beta invite at the link below.
Via MakerOS
