Blender Market and Humble Bundle: A Great Deal for You and Blender Market Creators

Are you familiar with Humble Bundle?

If not, let me help you out. Humble Bundle started as a means of getting cool games into the hands of people who liked them for an absurdly good price while also donating a portion of the proceeds to a charity. They started with retro games and quickly found themselves making bundles for more modern games, books, and even software. 

What started as a great and inexpensive way to get ahold of old games has become a great and inexpensive way to test out and find new products. And in the last few months, they’ve started offering bundles from some of your favorite Blender Market creators.

We’re especially excited about the latest bundle, the Blender Market Best of 2024 bundle. That bundle is a collection of 31 of the most popular products on Blender Market. It’s $1265 worth of add-ons and assets that you can get for just $30.

Some of you may have noticed these bundles and found yourself asking questions. Is this legitimate? Are the creators getting paid? Can I use products in the bundle for commercial work? What about updates to these products?

In our excitement about these bundles, we actually forgot to talk about them here. This meant that these questions were never clearly answered… which has led to a few misconceptions. So let’s try to clear some of that up.


Is it legit? Are creators getting paid?

YES! To put together these bundles, we contact the creator of each product and specifically invite them to be a part of it.

A bit of backstory: Earlier this year, the folks at Humble Bundle approached Autotroph (the parent company for Blender Market, CG Cookie, and Orange Turbine) about putting together a bundle.

We decided to test it out with CG Cookie courses and found it was tremendously successful. People who wanted to learn Blender got to do so for a great price while at the same time learning about all the great stuff that CG Cookie has to offer. And furthermore, the folks at Humble Bundle are an absolute joy to work with. We wanted to offer those same benefits to our Blender Market creators and their customers.

So once we figured out the theme for the bundle we wanted to put together and found the products that were the best fit for that theme, we contacted the creators of those products to see if they wanted to opt in. They get paid a share of the proceeds, along with Humble Bundle, the charity we choose, and Blender Market itself. This means that by purchasing the bundle, you are still supporting your favorite creators.


Can I use the products in a bundle for commercial use?

The answer here is a little nuanced, but hopefully we can make it understandable. There was initially a bit of confusion around this topic because the Humble Bundle terms of service specifically mention non-commercial use only for their service and for products in a bundle. However, their terms of service also say that the end user license agreements that come with products in a bundle can specify whether you can use products commercially. That means that product licenses supersede Humble Bundle’s terms of service.

All Blender add-ons have to be compliant with the GPL, which doesn’t allow for non-commercial restrictions. So you can definitely use included add-ons for commercial purposes. The GPL doesn’t cover assets, though, so we have another license for that. The majority of assets that come in these bundles are using Blender Market’s Royalty Free license, which specifically allows for commercial use. Occasionally there will be a product included that specifies personal use for assets, but that usage requirement is specifically noted in the product listing on the bundle’s page. So unless the product specifically says otherwise, you’re totally good to go if you want to use the products in these bundles for your commercial work. Yay!


Why don’t products come with support or future updates?

In the Blender community, we’re pretty used to the idea of having continued support for add-ons, especially when we buy them. Add-on developers are generally the kind of helpful people who want to make sure that their tools work for you. After all, they made something that is supposed to help you; it’s in their nature to want to continue helping you.

That said, the extremely discounted price on these bundles make them really, really attractive. We’re talking about tens of thousands of downloads. Most creators on Blender Market are individuals or small teams. They simply don’t have the bandwidth to support that many new users. So a compromise needed to be set. In order to afford such a steep discount, they need to prioritize giving support and future updates to the customers that pay full price. That same model is also used for most of Humble Bundles other bundles.

Of course, a lot of our creators weren’t fully satisfied with that compromise. They want to be able to give you that support. So in our latest bundle, many of the products come with a coupon to purchase support and future updates for those products. You still get the discount of purchasing the bundle while also getting the option to add support on the products you like the most. Like I said, our creators are great people.


Bundle up!

So there we go. These bundles from Humble Bundle featuring products from Blender Market creators are legitimate offers that do put money in the creators’ pockets. The products themselves are fully working versions that you can use any way you’d like, just as if you purchased them for their full price. The only catch is that the heavy discount means they don’t come with support or future updates, but many of the products in the bundle give you a coupon to add that support, if you wish.

If that sounds like a great deal to you, then head on over and snag the latest bundle for yourself while it’s still available.

Author - Jason van Gumster, Director of Marketing for Autotroph