I think thats the point the Glowforge army is missing. This is My opinion (and others). I don’t have to “Get It” and theres no need to sell me on I must Think like you. That is not complicated. Honestly, car analogies are really a poor example especially a radio Add On Content. But if my auto maker made an improvement to its reliability or safety I would expect that was not up-charge to rent monthly. My Tesla doesn’t have a please insert card here for your software improvement. lol Again, I don’t need a brain wash to think like everyone else. That does seem how this forum is run though. There are others with a voice and an opinion, maybe consider that and some day you to will “Get It”. IF there is NO need or value to the Premium why does this group fight so vigialantly to make it no big deal? If theres its No issue why is there NO acknowledgement of this simple service on the website? Seems wrong and that obvious.
That is what you don’t get; we aren’t trying to make you “think like us” we are simply pointing how the fallacies in your statements.
That is exactly why! No one “needs” the premium services. No one complained that these things didn’t exist until they created them and put them behind a pay-wall.
I agree with you @yelobird. My husband purchased my GF for me for Christmas this year. I had no idea about a Premium Membership. From all the commercials and research I did everyone talked about what the GF did. There was never a mention of having to use Inkscape or another program like that. During my free trial I tried to use some of the “Free with Premium” items and I was asked to put them in my cart and pay for them, not exactly “free with Premium”. My trial ended today and I found out I can’t even use the fonts I used to create a memorial ornament for my mother anymore. As a matter of fact, I am not able to use any fonts. When I try to enter/change text, the Premium subscription pops up. I am new to the laser, but I have been crafting with Cricut products for several years. These machines cost between $179.00 and $400 and offer free fonts and images. You can also pay for the monthly subscription, which is minimal compared to the GF Premium Subscription, at $9.99 for additional fonts and images. I’m guessing that now that I am not going to fork out the $50.00 a month for the Premium Service I will have to figure out a way to create the images and change fonts/words in another program and upload them to my GF in order to make anything…not exactly the impression I was given watching the GF videos all over my social media/youtube and the internet. I will figure it out in time, but it has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Well, there was no Premium membership until just recently. The Premium features (including text editing) have only been around a few months. For the first three years that the Glowforge was available we all had to do all of our editing of designs in other programs, such as Inkscape, Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or CorelDRAW.
Now that Premium is available it’s a convenient alternative to those programs, but those who’d rather not subscribe can continue to use external editing software the same as we always have.
Personally I did subscribe (using one of the discount codes) but so far I’m still doing just about all my design work in Affinity Designer out of habit because that’s what I’m used to using for the last three years.
Thanks so much for your response. Unfortunately, the discount codes expired about a week before I bought my machine. I’ll just have to figure out another program and work with it that way. I can’t justify spending $50.00 a month for a subscription.
There’s a Black Friday code that makes it $25/month: GF23579BFP (It’s still valid. It’s good through Dec 31.)
It was listed in the November update:
Thanks so much for this information. That makes it more reasonable.
Then a few months ago they should have noted the premium service on the website with pricing. Seems simple enough and honest for new buyers? Honestly, it’s bad enough that this system needs on average a $50 per month internet connection coupled with the after thought Premium your sunk for $100 per month to use a machine you bought. Lol. And please don’t pile on with the “but you don’t need it” please as it’s rather condescending. My personal issue is with the post sale “sale” (without a price mind you stating. “ Fast Lane processing
Your prints are processed on upgraded, ultra-high-performance servers in the cloud, exclusively reserved for Premium members.” Really? I remember paying close to a double premium to get the PRO model at 3x speed and it appears I get to return that time made with slow lane processing? Shell game comes to mind…
Those are two different things.
Processing is submission of the set design with settings to the cloud when you hit print in the GFUI. Severs process and then send it to the GF for you to hit the physical button.
The higher price Pro machine is then faster than the basic at doing the actual work.
The whole fast lane processing is not a big deal at all. I think they shouldn’t even advertise that. It only affects processing time (the time it takes before the button turns white) and not the time it takes to actually run the job. So for most jobs it saves a few seconds. In my experience the button starts glowing before I even walk over to it. So the fast lane thing makes zero difference to me.
It makes zero difference to you maybe but to others like me it does! If you pay more for a machine to process Faster why would you want that time (time equals money in manufacturing) to be offset buy slow processing load times?? Any Premium offset that limits the capability of the purchase is a noose to extort funds and as time progresses this rope will get tighter for all in a captive product environment. On the other post regarding Black Friday secret discount. For such an amazing gesture (I don’t think so) wouldn’t you Think something like that would be shared via the New Owner (25 day) email last week pushing this soon to be lost service? No, that’s not to be known by customers unless they complain and search a forum Run by the company???
It sounds like there’s nothing you like about the expensive thing you just bought. Why not return it and get a different system that suits your expectations better?
They ensure that won’t happen with the minimum 30% restock fee plus shipping. Note that happens the day premium test expires. Who knows maybe through multiple channels I can educate enough potentials to offset my concerns via lost sales.
To those folks that believe the Premium service is needed to use the GF machine: I find using Inkscape to be infinitely preferrable than the GF Premium interface for almost everything. Especially font selection. Futzing around with the GF Premium fonts is painful by comparison. The GF fonts are not recognizable versions that folks are used to from other design programs. And figuring out which font to use is very time consuming. The user needs to select a font based on a brief example, type the desired text, select a new font, select a new font, etc. In Inkscape you can type the text and very quickly scroll through the available fonts as quickly as you can press the down arrow key. Much more convenient. Here is a screen capture of the process.
My point is that so much more is possible by not depending on the GF Premium editing capabilities. I might decide to purchase the Premium but would only use it as a secondary function. It’s worth it to spend an hour or so to learn the basic functions in free Inkscape.
And if there’s a font in Premium that you want in Inkscape, chances are you can just get it from https://fonts.google.com.
I’m sorry… you’ll have to pay for that extra cheese sir!
Is that you Jason???
No, he must be a different unsatisfied non-premium owner. Merry Xmas.
Merry Christmas to you as well.
I think in my biostatistics course in med school we covered how to figure out that very statement! (although we don’t have an owner count in the thread just the post-count) But being generous of 200 unique posters in the thread would give us 0.6% are complaining (heck 0.6% barely registers as “any of”). Even in the most unusual circumstances 0.6% is never a “most of” situation, so I think as you pointed out we have hard math evidence that supports your comment!