Case Study · Our Own Product · SaaS Marketplace
3DPrintZA
Fiverr for people with 3D printers. Anyone with a printer in the garage gets their own online shop, instant quoting, stock and material tracking, invoicing and a printer fleet, while suppliers sell to all of them and customers find them all in one place.
A printer in the garage becomes a business
South Africa is full of people with a Bambu or an Ender and no way to sell what it can do. Quoting happens on WhatsApp, stock lives in their head, invoices in Word. 3DPrintZA is the print companion: find the correct filament, manage the whole print business, know what every print cost, stay stocked, and sell to the whole country.
Signature · Your Own Shop
Every studio gets {studio}.3dprintza.co.za
The Studio tier’s core feature: a hosted storefront on the operator’s own subdomain with quoting, products, a customer portal, about and contact pages, built in a live-preview storefront builder. No web developer required. Type your studio name; pick your colour.
Upload your STL, get a price in seconds.
WhatsApp, phone, form and map, on every storefront.
💬 WhatsApp usPrefer your own website? The Embed tier ships the same quote engine as a one-line iframe widget with a CDN loader and a code generator in settings, live preview included. An 8-step wizard takes a new operator from first printer to go-live.
The Tour · Real Screens, Live System
The whole print business, screen by screen
Manage your print business
Every print, on the record
Personal, stock, prototype or gift: every job lands in the register with its material, spool, printer, print time, star rating and exactly how many grams it ate. The pipeline runs Queued, Printing, Completed, and updates itself as items progress.
Know what every print cost
R14,08. To the cent. Deducted from the spool.
Open any print and the costing is already done: filament cost from the actual grams used, electricity and machine time from your rates, a suggested price from your margin rules. The spool it came off is now lighter by exactly that much.
Load your stock
Inventory in the spool’s own colour
Filaments group by brand with their real logos. Each material shows a ring in its actual colour: grams left, grams used, rand per kilogram, spools on the shelf. Add a material once and every print, quote and order draws from the same stock.
Running low? Already connected
The supply chain lives in the sidebar
When a spool runs low the system knows, and the supplier network is one click away: real South African filament and hardware businesses, nationwide, with favourites and per-supplier catalogues. Restocking is a flow, not a Friday mission.
Order without leaving the desk
One cart across every supplier
Browse 4,397 products by category, supplier, material or price. Out-of-stock states come through live, favourites persist, and one cart handles a mixed order across suppliers. Your consumables update when it arrives.
Have your own online shop
From print bed to product listing
The dragon you printed yesterday becomes a product today: photos, price, category, colour variants pulled straight from your filament stock, and a Live badge when it is published to your storefront and the marketplace.
Capture jobs from anywhere
WhatsApp orders become real orders
Most SA print jobs still start in a chat. The capture form takes a walk-in or WhatsApp job in thirty seconds: customer, model link, line items with material and spool, quoted price, delivery method. Now it is tracked like everything else.
Generate finance reports
Books the accountant will actually accept
Profit and loss over any period, expense and income breakdowns by category, monthly trends and product profitability. Transactions link to their orders, printers and materials, invoices attach as files, and the whole thing exports to CSV.
Signature · Find the Correct Filament
100+ materials, 9 scoring dimensions, zero jargon
Two human questions, hard disqualification for anything unsafe, then a ranked answer. Pick “food container” and watch ABS get thrown out. Budget is dots, never prices.
What is the print for?
What matters most?
PLA
The friendly default. Easy, cheap, lovely finish.
Signature · The Pricing Engine
Pure functions, 77 tests, one rounding
This is the maths behind every storefront quote, embed widget and that R14,08 print above: material, labour, electricity, colour surcharge, setup and minimums, with SA defaults built in. Drag the sliders.
The Marketplace Engine Room
4,397 products did not type themselves in
The quote widget on your own site: one line of code, CDN loader
The hosted storefront on your subdomain plus the full back office
Multi-printer bureaus: teams, B2B accounts, Net 30 invoicing
Each tier maps to a real epic on the board. Operators connect their own PayFast, Ozow, Payzone or Yoco keys; platform revenue is subscriptions, never a cut. Save 15% on annual billing.
Design decisions
Supplier-first acquisition
Suppliers bring buyer networks; buyers own printers; printer owners become studios. The marketplace bootstraps itself.
Their keys, their money
No payment facilitator licensing, no held funds. Every operator connects their own gateway and gets paid directly.
Browser-side estimation for V1
three.js volume extraction quotes instantly without Docker-hosted slicing. Server-side OrcaSlicer waits for V2.
Dots, not prices
Filament costs vary by supplier, region and week. Cost tiers as dots avoid false precision.
Schema ownership split
One Claude owns migrations and RLS via MCP; the other builds frontend and never runs CREATE TABLE.
SA-native to the bone
Eskom tariffs, PayFast, POPIA, VAT, ZAR and UK English as defaults. An international competitor rebuilds or loses.
Next.js 15 · Supabase, 52+ tables with JWT-claim tenancy · Vercel wildcard subdomains · three.js · Tailwind + shadcn · Resend · Vitest (77 pricing tests) · Playwright · tracked as 392 WAID tickets, 130+ shipped
More screens
If you own a 3D printer in South Africa, this should be the app you cannot work without. Your storefront, your quoting, your stock, your printers, your suppliers, your money: your whole print business, running from one place.
The product vision, and the build target