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Selling prints from Printables

The uploader picks a licence per model, most often a Creative Commons one, and the commercial question turns on which.

On this page
  1. Who grants the right to sell
  2. Where to find it
  3. What the labels mean
  4. What to keep
  5. The authority

Who grants the right to sell

The designer. Printables hosts the file, but the person who uploaded it decides whether prints can be sold, model by model. So two models on the same site can have opposite answers.

Where to find it

This section is about the platform's web pages, not its terms, so the terms can't confirm it. We haven't checked it against the live site recently, so treat it as a starting point and check the site yourself.

  • The licence is shown on the model page itself, chosen by whoever uploaded it.
  • Check which Creative Commons licence it is, not just that it is one. They differ on exactly this question.
  • Where a designer wants to permit commercial use on different terms, look for a link out to their own page or membership.

What the labels mean

A licence containing NC
Non-commercial. Selling prints is outside it, however the model was obtained and whatever it cost.
A licence containing ND
No derivatives. Printing is usually fine; remixing, rescaling into a new product or merging it into your own design is not.
A GNU or BSD licence
Less common here but offered alongside Creative Commons. These come from software rather than design, and what they require of someone selling a physical object is not always obvious — read the specific one.
A licence containing BY
Attribution. The designer must be credited — which for a seller means in the listing, not just on a card in the box.

What to keep

Terms change, and in a dispute what counts is what you agreed to on the day. Save a copy when you buy, not when someone asks for it.

  • A copy of the model page showing which licence was selected on the day you downloaded it. Uploaders can change a licence later.
  • The designer's name exactly as it should appear in your credit.
  • The model URL.

The authority

This page describes how licensing works here in our own words. It is not a statement of what you are permitted to do, and it does not reproduce anyone's terms. Read the Printables terms

Printables is Prusa's, so its terms live on prusa3d.com. Note there are two documents: the general terms covering all Prusa sites, and a separate Printables Terms of Service — the second is the one that deals with model licensing, and it is the one linked here.

Confirmed against the platform's own terms on 12 Sept 2026. Their document was last updated 1 Aug 2022 — if that date has moved, so may this page have.