CGTrader Reviews 

Everything you want is available on this platform. Very nice sellers, very attentive. I sell myself. It's a great platform.

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I hate this website so much.

Buyers, subsequently classified as "fraudulent users," downloaded 10 of our models in all the provided formats.
CGtrader deleted all our profits from these sales, thus labeling them "fraudulent users."
So, CGtrader sold 10 models for free, and we're footing the bill.

How could you have allowed all our models to be downloaded if these buyers were fraudulent and the payments were false?
Aren't you insured for these cases? Isn't that your job, your part of the contract that binds you and us? You insure and secure our sales?

We are victims of fraud for which YOU are responsible and perhaps even complicit!

Furthermore, NO EMAIL was sent to us to warn us, or even to keep us informed of the consequences, since you MUST take the necessary measures.

We are therefore requesting full compensation for the damages.

I want to express my deepest gratitude to the CGTrader team, and especially to Dovydas, for the incredible support I received. Dovydas went above and beyond to help me resolve all my questions and issues quickly and professionally. His patience, friendliness, and expertise truly made a difference, and I can confidently say that such support is rare to find nowadays.

Every interaction I’ve had with the team has been outstanding, and Dovydas’ help reminded me once again why CGTrader is the best in the industry. Thank you for creating an environment where artists feel valued and supported. You are truly the best!

Hi,
I ordered a pendant and it was made excellently and
quickly. CGTrader offers exceptional service that I've never found anywhere else.

Easy to work with.
It was the first time I bought a model and it looks fine and easy to work with. I liked the texture. I printed 1:64 scale so I cannot confirm the details as it is too small but it looks like the character portrayed by the model.

I bought a couple of different models to print. They worked well, look good, and were a great price!

3D artists should avoid CGTrader like a plague because their ultimate goal presently is to use your 3d models for generative ai purposes against your wish, while at the same time slashing your royalty rate by 7-10%. Be wary of anyone giving CGTrader positive reviews after June 1 2025, for those are either paid shills, low information artists who have no idea what is going on in the marketplace or 3D artists with humiliation kink. Worst part is their laughable attempts to gaslight 3d artists with the very obvious lie that CGTrader’s clearly detrimental policies are totally for the "benefit" of the artists. I never thought there would be a 3D marketplace worse that Turbosquid but here we are.

CGTrader started as a decent 3d marketplace where 3d artists can sell their models with a higher royalty payout than most marketplaces. With a baseline 70% royalty rate (before deductions like transaction fee) artists can climb up the ladder to 80% royalty rate, through a performance based rating system. For years it looked promising and many 3d artists worked very hard to climb the ranks.

Many years later after 3d artists sent the 3d marketplace to the top of the line with sheer dedication and hard work, CGTrader started to show their true colours and those colours are the most unsavory. They implemented a rather needlessly complex, cumbersome and nonsensical payout system that is highly unpredictable and painfully random, depending on when you make a sale. It went downhill from there with one horrible anti-3d artist policy after another implemented in quick succession.

The first sign of their nefarious intent on brazen intellectual property theft reared its ugly head when they implemented a default ai opt-in on all models with optional opt-out after the fact. Many 3d artists told them to kick rocks and opted out of that garbage. Then they came with the nifty idea of forced discounts on models with e-mail opt-out sent directly to CGTrader, otherwise they will ignore the sales and promotions opt-out option already selected by the artists in the user settings, thereby including all your models in their forever race to the bottom discounts and sales promotions, against your wish. Again many 3d artist told them to go outside, take off their shoes and kick rocks.

As if those were not enough buffoonery, they decided to slash artists’ royalty rates significantly with a harebrained impossible to attain and sustain imbecilic rating system. This new system led to instant 7-10% decline in royalty rates for a very large number of the artists. While the 3d artists were already on the ground writhing in agonizing pain, these sadistic unscrupulous ghouls who have blatantly refused to take “no” for an answer decided to get in some licks with this new policy that will take effect on July 14, 2025. A very odious policy apparently geared toward forceful takeover of 3d artists’ intellectual properties for generative ai purposes against their wish, even after the models have been deleted and removed from their marketplace. I am not a lawyer but I am pretty sure that is illegal in every jurisdiction.

So what’s next, because I do not think they have hit rock bottom. Perhaps 3d artists will be mandated with no opt-out option to pay CGTrader a monthly subscription fee to publish models which CGtrader will automatically own. The only viable option is for 3D artists delete all models from CGtrader before July 14, 2025 and beyond and get ready for a massive class action lawsuit against the unscrupulous marketplace because one can reasonably infer from their recent dubious actions that they are very likely to retain possession of your 3d models and use them as they please, against your wish, even after artists have deleted and removed them from CGTrader. Whatever they say cannot be trusted. Their assurances must me considered meaningless and without merit.

Model is good and accurate but I have buildings problems with sprues! Some of the parts have to be made horizontally some vertically. Lots of trial and error . Got it fixed sort of but no way to print fenders on car body. They are weak and fall off. Radio antenna always breaks off. No problem but I can’t modify it myself.

CGTrader offers many choices for 3D models, etc.

CGTrader always manages to present something negative for us in the most positive way! ;)

- They unilaterally changed the payment method to Hyperwallet.
- My "Settings" mysteriously reset to "Participate in promotions" last month, even though I had it set to "NOT participate" since I joined.
- A mysterious company buys tons of models within minutes, but I still can't see the payment on my dashboard even after a week.

And now, with the new earnings calculation system based on the past 12 months, am I supposed to just accept losing 10%?!

Good luck keeping your CG slaves, CGTrader!

I’ve been on this platform since 2019 and have invested years into building a high-quality, real-time-ready asset library. In 2021, I reached my peak performance in sales that year. Since then, despite increasing my portfolio from 24 to 54 carefully crafted models, my sales have dropped by roughly 80%.

With this new payout system based only on the past 12 months, I’m being pushed down from an 80% royalty rate to under 70%, not because my content declined in quality or effort, but because the platform-wide visibility and sales have tanked. That’s deeply disheartening, especially when CGTrader’s competitive royalty model was one of the main reasons I stayed here instead of switching to marketplaces like TurboSquid.

It feels like long-time, dedicated sellers are being penalized for shifts we can’t control — from AI flood and batch uploads to algorithm changes and declining platform traffic. I will be increasing my prices to try and absorb the drop in royalties, but if that doesn't stabilize things, I’ll strongly consider moving my portfolio elsewhere.

I really hope CGTrader reconsiders how this change affects loyal contributors who helped shape the platform in the first place.

Thanks for your time,

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.

Awesome quality. I'm super happy with the model I bought and the set it arrived with. Saved me tons of time!

I had an excellent experience with my purchase. I found exactly what I was looking for, and the whole process was clear, quick, and hassle-free. The platform is user-friendly. I’d definitely shop here again and highly recommend it!

The old starting payout is already 10% lower than other sites, now it is even lower. My rate went from 72% to 62%. If I have know this earlier, I would never upload any of my new model to this site

Thankfully they've been supportive and understanding of my mistake and they were able to quickly resolve my issue and were able to respond back as promptly as they could. I would gladly make a purchase when I am ready. Thank you for your business.