Dev log #23: Big News, and a 2025 Roadmap

Well hello, and welcome to 2025!

Yes, I’m two months late. We’re already 1/6th of the way through the year, but trust me, it’s going to be a good one.

Since last we spoke, we’ve made three major decisions regarding the future of Poly Haven, the first one being:

We’re getting rid of the ads

Hoorah!

Back in 2020, we made the decision, together with a vote from you guys, to show ads on hdrihaven.com (prior to the merge into polyhaven.com).

Of course, this was a fairly controversial decision, at least in my head. I hate ads, run an adblocker on every device, and care a lot about online privacy. And yet, ultimately, this decision was something that benefited Poly Haven and the world of CC0 3D assets greatly.

At the time, Patreon was our only source of income, and the ads almost doubled this and gave me the courage (and funds) to start Poly Haven - using the success of the HDRIs to fund more textures and 3D models.

Things, however, have changed in the last four years. You guys have pulled through, and our Patreon donations have more than doubled since then. At the same time, due to regulation changes and our commitment to keeping the ads small and out of the way, the revenue we receive from ads has halved despite the website traffic tripling.

To be specific, we get around $2,000 per month in ad revenue, from roughly 4 million users. That’s $0.006 per user per year.

The user experience on the site is very close to my heart, and I feel that this revenue is too small of a benefit. So we’ve decided to remove the ads completely this week.

Now, $2,000 is not nothing. In fact, it’s nearly double the average monthly salary here in South Africa. But we feel that if we can take away those nasty ads and spend a little more effort encouraging the 4 million visitors to the site to donate to us, we can make up for it.

Speaking of encouraging donations, here’s how we plan to do that…

(re)Introducing Asset Vaults!

The next major thing we’ve decided to do this year is to paywall all of our assets!

Just kidding. Poly Haven will always be free and CC0.

The idea of the asset vaults is to introduce soft-exclusive content that becomes public once specific funding goals are reached.

For example, imagine an asset pack for a Japanese temple filled with scanned objects, plants, materials, HDRIs, and maybe even some ambient sound recordings. This asset pack would be accessible to anyone who supports us on Patreon and would also become public once we reach, say, 2000 patrons.

Photo by MemoryCatcher

Essentially we’re trying to encourage people to support us to get access to large volumes of content while at the same time supporting the release of these same assets for free for everyone (as well as our work developing even more assets). It’s a three-birds-one-stone kind of situation.

For those of you who have been around for the last 8 years, this might sound familiar. When first launching the Patreon for HDRI Haven, this is what I did with all the old HDRIs that were previously for sale. I wanted to ensure the success of the Patreon before publishing all the old content for free in case it failed miserably and I had to go back to selling them. There were three HDRI vaults, each with a funding goal to reach. Within a few months, all three goals were met, and over 100 new HDRIs were published.

The difference here is that by supporting us you immediately get access to the vaults (before, even patrons had to wait for the goal to be reached). So it’s similar to the early-access concept we have now, but instead of having a specific date when each asset goes public one by one, we have a funding/patron goal where a huge collection of them goes public all at once.

We’ll still have a steady stream of new assets free for everyone (right now, we’re managing a new asset almost every weekday), plus the community projects which will always be immediately free. The vaults will be in addition to all that.

What exactly can you expect to see in these vaults? You’ll find out soon! We’ll make a proper announcement of them when we have some ready, and explain more about our ambitions then.

Why are we doing this? Are we greedy?

No, every cent we receive goes straight to funding more assets. The real reason we’re doing this is because we want to make Poly Haven even more free, and we need a significant amount of funds to do that.

What do I mean? How does introducing vaults make Poly Haven more free?

Free the Add-on

Our Blender add-on, which is a $30 product on 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 the Blender Market.

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 doing 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 to remove the part that makes it unsustainable: Our overreliance on the product sales.

But how do we do this? Just make the add-on free tomorrow?

If we did that, we’d have to retrench half our staff and close our office. That would suck, not just for us but for everyone who wants us to keep making more free assets.

So, let’s do it slowly, more sustainably. Let’s use the vaults and some UI changes on the website to encourage more people to support our vision of a world without ads, products, or paywalls.

Within the next year or two, we hopefully double our Patreon donations again, and then make the Blender add-on truly free.

So that’s what I mean when I say we’re not doing the vaults because we’re greedy. In fact, the end goal is to be (financially) in the same place we are now, just without a paid product propping us up.

Do I regret making a paid product to help fund Poly Haven? No. I rarely regret anything that helps me learn and solidify what our values are and where we draw the line. The add-on, and the ads for that matter, undoubtedly helped us get to where we are today, but they’re not where we want to go. We want the future of Poly Haven to be open and community-driven - self-reliant and fully sustainable. 

What’s next?

Getting back down to earth a little, here’s what’s actually been going on day-to-day:

• SideFX (Houdini) has sponsored us to support USD better, not just for our static models but also for plant assets and textures. This includes making lighter static versions of our geometry nodes assets for Blender as well. More on this once we’re ready to ship the new USD files.

• We’re making an Unreal version of our Namaqualand collection, which will be available for free on Fab. In doing this, we’re also exploring the implications of supporting Unreal natively on our site for all assets.

• The moon assets, fabric collection, and wood scans are all still in the works.

• We’re making a game! A real one this time. Things are still in early preproduction, we’ve spent much of the last two weeks researching and brainstorming, so I’d rather not make any promises here yet, but you can bet it’ll be tied to our next community project.

• Not to get your hopes up, but we’re investigating (again) the requirements and regulations for doing drone/aerial HDRIs. This may not be feasible, but I’ll keep you posted.

• Of course, there’s also the usual steady flow of assets from our contractors, asset donations, and some content from our backlog that gets published almost every weekday.