In 2022, we released our Blender add-on that implements Poly Haven’s library of 2000 assets directly into the asset browser, allowing easy drag-and-drop imports and other small workflow enhancements.
We meant this to be an experiment in selling paid products that offer users convenience, helping to fund the creation of 3D assets without monetizing our assets themselves (which will always be free & CC0).
Now, it has become one of our primary income sources, and we’d like to change that.
One of our main goals for 2026/2027 is to stop selling our Blender add-on and make it free for everyone forever.
Why?
In a nutshell, to get back to our roots of free content and open source.
Selling products is not the direction we want to take Poly Haven. We aim to lower the barrier of entry for 3D artists by making free, high-quality content for everyone. Restricting creative tools behind a paywall does not fit with that mission.
Building a financially sustainable open-source/public domain project is uniquely challenging, but we believe the right direction to go is to make it community-focused and trust that users who agree with what we are doing will support us.
Some context…
This section is a partial excerpt from our 23rd Dev Log originally posted on Patreon.
Our Blender add-on, which is a $30 product on Superhive (previously the ‘Blender Market’) and included as part of the $5 Patreon tier, has been instrumental in the progress we’ve made on Poly Haven in the last two years.
You can see this graph any time by visiting our finance reports page, but to save you a click, here’s Poly Haven’s regular income over time since 2021:
That big orange block that appears in September 2022? That’s the sales of our add-on on Superhive.
Since then, we’ve grown to 6 full-time staff and 5 part-time contractors, all working on creating free high-quality 3D assets for you. A big part of what makes that possible is selling the add-on.
But, this is not sustainable. We want to be in the business of making assets, not selling products.
All of our assets are free and CC0, which means anyone can take them and make a similar product, even a free one. Maybe even one that’s included in Blender by default. That’s great, that’s what we want! But that would hurt our income and the sustainability of the Poly Haven project as a whole.
The solution here is not to try and crack down on people using or distributing our assets like that – we want our assets to be used everywhere by everyone at no cost – but instead let’s remove the part that makes it unsustainable: Our over-reliance on the product sales.
How?
In order to remove our reliance on product sales (without changing the pace or quality of our work), we have to replace that income with something else first: Patreon donations.
Right now (June 2025), we have around 1900 active supporters on Patreon who donate an average of $4.50 each. Based on that, we’ve done the math accounting expected changes over the next few years and estimated that we would need around 5000 total patrons to replace the add-on income.
At that point, we could stop selling the add-on and be financially in the same place we are today without any consequences.
More than doubling our Patreon support is going to take a lot; it’s taken almost ten years to get here today. But we believe that if we employ some active effort to encourage new users who share our vision to help us, we can get to our goal in about two years.
Ever since removing ads on our site and adding some UI changes to encourage donations, we’ve seen significant growth in new sign-ups on Patreon.
Add to that our new Vaults system, and our goal of 5000 patrons is not too far-fetched. If we maintain this rate of about 200 new patrons per month, we’ll be there in just over a year. Realistically, we expect this graph to plateau soon and things to take a bit longer than that, but it’s not out of reach.
When?
When we reach the final goal of 5000 patrons, the add-on will be removed from Superhive and released freely to everyone.
Until then, nothing changes. The add-on is still a paid product, available to $5 patrons and for a $30 purchase on Superhive.
If you believe in our mission to create free and open content, at a high quality, to support artists around the world without any financial barriers, then join us on Patreon today.
Even a $1 monthly donation will help us reach our goal and free the add-on for everyone.
What happens to previous customers and supporters once it’s free?
We know making something that previously cost money free is a big deal, and maybe even a bit of a kick in the balls for some of you who paid for it.
This is not actually the first time we’ve done that. 10 years ago, what was yet to become known as Poly Haven was instead a store where I sold HDRIs. Through a leap of faith and support from the community, I released all of my work for free and gradually turned it into what Poly Haven is today.
We hope you’ll understand why we’re doing it (for the greater good), but to thank you for your support anyway, all supporters of the add-on ($3+ patrons and customers on Superhive) will forever have early access to our future assets, including everything in the Vaults.
Even once the add-on is eventually free for everyone, our loyal supporters will have something that others don’t: assets that will ultimately be free, but for a time are exclusive to them. Just like the add-on.
Thank you pls