Received another much lower price for premium monthly installment payments. If only there was a value to this service.
99 ready-to-print laser designs with more added every month, 2+ million vector graphics to use in your own designs, design tools in the app including over 900 fonts and generators for offsets/outlines and stamps, a versioned storage system that lets you roll back your designs to past versions, additional file formats and export options, and faster servers for processing your designs. It’s hard to argue none of this has value to anyone, whether it’s something you currently want to buy or not.
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99 items that are Already available to purchase IF anyone actually wanted them. Not a value. Vector images that are free via Google, not a value. Fonts also free via Google, not a value. Online storage, well in my view as the software is held captive online this Should by default be included in the 6k purchase of this laser. Just my opinion…
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I pay $65/month (because I"m in Canada and the $50 is USD)…and I was never offered a discount when I first bought my Glowforge (Nov 2020) with a $14.00 rate. I’m questioning what I’m actually getting for my $65/month and why I wasn’t offered any discount rate to lock into???
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You should email support, or else post in the Problems and Support area, as either of those things will open a support ticket. Support doesn’t monitor this part of the forum, and the rest of us don’t know the answer to your question.
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The $14.99 Premium subscription rate ended on November 3, 2020, so you might have bought your machine after it had expired.
They do offer a discount occasionally (in December they offered half off with a coupon), so since you missed that one, you could cancel until they offer another special. (Be sure to read Dan’s announcements every month or so. ) You will miss any freebies along the way, but you might not be using the other functions now, and prefer to wait until they add more goodies to the software.
The Premium subscription is going to be a continually growing thing. Be aware that if you cancel your subscription, you are going to lose some functionality that is associated with it…like Text, Shapes, Offset, Stamps and Puzzles, as well as DXF and the free for commercial use designs.
(Or you might not lose DXF, that one might be grandfathered in at a later date. But you will be limited in storage to most recent 30 days worth of files, so check out the discussion threads for the announcements starting with September 2020…that one lists the Premium functions.)
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Yeah. Oddly owner discounts are oddly a secret unless you complain about the Value of this paid subscription and refuse it then Bam they are emailing discounts to get your monthly useless contribution. And no those claiming it was only available in November are wrong. Just got this one via email when I refused to join the premium racket:
“While premium is usually $50 per month, we are now selling it in an annual subscription! Until the end of the month the annual (usually $600) is $249 and will renew at that price until you choose to cancel.”
Just skip it, nobody has yet to show Why this forever fee adds Any value.
“Secrets” are not usually published in the What’s New (which go out as emails to everybody unless you’ve turned those off)…
and posted to the Forum…
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Then it seems odd so many post never seeing these offers then no? I know I never received any at purchase. Also note that Some people buy these machines to make parts no to hang out on a forum so maybe a different channel of communication may be in order. Say maybe their website? Example; several (in the know) responded that offer expired in November when it Clearly hasn’t. Maybe there’s another secret forum link even members are missing lol.
They were talking about a prior offers, because there have been several. You stated that you got this offer because you were unhappy:
That was incorrect and I linked to that exact offer being available to everyone, literally off the website, and commented that it was also posted on the forum by a staff member.
Look - I get that you aren’t happy, but stop posting blatant falsehoods so nobody has point out your errors in order to assure that the information on this forum is at least close to accurate for other users.
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Well done the March ad is cheaper then the January ad. At this rate it should be 10$ by November which might be close to its actual value. Lol
Any new coupons
Nope.
I bugs me too. I own a cricut maker and the subscription is a little over $100 a year for the premium for that. but if you do not sign up you still get basicly everything you get with with glowforge premium. It makes me question why a machime that I paid 7 grand for costs me around $600 a year to use the extras that are included in a $200 cricut cutter. and more people use the cricut cutter because of the price point, so you cant says its to help cover the server cost because cricut is able to do it without issues with way more customers. Just doesnt make sense.
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The only people paying $50/month are rich enough not to care, or careless enough not have noticed any of the sales. The majority of folks are paying closer to $200/year to Cricut’s $100 - and Cricut is an 18 year old Nasdaq traded company with ~650 employees, while 
didn’t exist 7 years ago.
So which are you?
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We went to renew our “Premium” subscription last night and was shocked that the previous $14.99 charge was now either $50/month or $239/year. Being on a fixed income and having a relatively small business model and few customers at this time makes having the Glowforge rather untenable along with fighting with poor app consistency issues (moving designs after hitting print, despite calibrating and using set focus, inability to reliably use the pass-through because of aforementioned inconsistencies in design placement after hitting print). We’ve followed all the guides, sent in our logs and have been told our Glowforge is operating “within specs”. We’ve wasted a lot of material and have an abundance of “oopsie products” that are either off center, misaligned or have other “print” issues. And of course the reliance on an internet based apps really hurts when the local cable provider spends more time with outages than uptime. There are days when we can’t do ANYTHING with the glowforge because of that. IT has been frustrating to say the least. SO, last night we made the decision to put our Glowforge up for sale, try to recoup some of our costs and have found another machine with some better specs and uses a LOCAL application for design creation and processing. AND it costs quite a bit less than the Glowforge with a few more features, has good reviews and comes from a company with good ratings and support. I guess this is a live and learn situation, the Glowforge was appealing has done a “decent” enough job to date but the rising costs versus failure rate just doesn’t make it worth it for us anymore. AND there is the issue of not being able to use the top 2 inches or so of our material because it will not show up inside of the app’s “design area”. And with the again aforementioned imaging inconsistencies we can’t reliably print part of the design, move the material and finish the design. That always ends in failure.
Unfortunately the reliance on “cloud based” apps and features along with increasing demands on bandwidth, rising ISP costs and constant “network upgrades” means we spend quite a bit of time unable to function and have a lot of dead air time.
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If you sign up for a special discount price for Premium, that price continues to apply as long as your subscription doesn’t lapse. If the signup software doesn’t recognize it, a simple email to Support will fix the problem.
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In there lies the problem, we had to lapse for 30 days due to budget constraints and some a–wipe creating google ads on my account and taking me for a grand. Of course there is NO way to contact google other than a webform and after sending nearly a hundred of them to resolve the issue the bank had to get involved. Even THEY couldn’t contact or get a response from google so they credited us back the money. Of course not after the damage was already done.
So yea, insult to injury. And I believe it is a shady practice to bait and switch like that.
Yes, I’m a bit burned by Glowforge lately and pretty much every company out there since this crap covid BS. Honesty and Customer Service is a thing of the past. All about the almighty dollar and how they can monetize your information and habits.
/rant
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I’m not sure how that applies to Glowforge, but whatever. Did you try contacting Glowforge support to let them know why you lapsed, to see if they would reinstate you at your previous price?
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If you are sure you want to sell and go a different direction, I wish you good luck.
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