Thank you for sharing and the kind words. Im making this purely for the love of the game, making a product people love and get value from. I know I hate signing up just to try something, so a loginless option was a natural choice.
If people won't use something free, they won't pay. If people won't use something without registering, they certainly will never pay. Fast way to know if I'm making a product people love and use, remove all barriers to using it!
I love this story so much! Exactly why I built this! I'm going to have to go look at your traces to see your workflow and how you prompted to get what you needed.
Yeah, I'm currently working on how to get other export file types. I want to avoid charging for the service directly and try monetize through printing services or something if I have to monetize. But you're right, alternative export options might be a good premium feature of I had to go that route.
Thanks! Well, it had previously been about $5usd a day. Until today and this post... So far in the last 24 hours I've auto topped up while I was asleep 4 times and spent $170 bucks on inference alone.
The complexity of the model does heavily influence the cost. Some models can cost me at little as 7 cents to generate. Others can be a couple bucks.
At the moment I'm focusing on user experience. I just trying to make a product people love as number 1 priority. I'm constantly trying to improve the speed and quality of the model outputs for user. Thankfully, optimising speed helps bring costs down as a side effect too!
I'm also self-funding my own solo-dev "in it for the love of the game" agentic app[0], mine for woodworking. It also supports STL output for printing the woodworking designs.
I found building an MCP was the easiest way to avoid paying for inference or having to charge to try it out. Anyone can add the MCP to chatgpt or claude and use their subscription to do the inference.
Heya! Thanks for the useful set of questioning.
I hadn't seen earthtojake/text-to-cad, looks cool I'll have to check it out. I approached creating printy to solve the problem of friends and family wanting me to print "something" for them, but them not knowing CAD or how to search thingiverse or whatever.
The other reason was, I like to do woodwork or other physical maker hobbies, but going and trying to hack something together in tinkercad to use in my project would end up burning hours I could have been building.
Ideally, printytron solves those.
I've been doing some work on file types recently - I'm hoping to give more support for different types, to allow you to do exactly what your describing. Do you have any specific file types you're chasing?
As for the production parts question, I'm not sure how to answer that. Because I suspect you and I have different definitions of production parts. At the end of the day I'm working on Printy for the love of the game. I just want to make a product people love using and is useful. (Hence leading with entirely unlogged-in experience first.)
reply