Cricut subscription model change

Since Cricut and their Design Space was referenced a lot when the addition of premium features for Glowforge became subscription, I wanted to share this change. The Cricut community is currently on fire because the company has decided that if you do not subscribe to their monthly plan ($10 a month), your uploads are now limited to 20 a month instead of the previous unlimited. Before, you could design in any program and use their interface for printing without paying a fee - no matter how much you uploaded. There are many businesses and personal users upset right now… and we will see if feedback changes anything.

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That really sucks! They don’t rollover any of the allowed 20. Guess I won’t be buying a circuit anytime soon.

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This certainly makes Glowforge look better by comparison, particularly Glowforge’s choice to continue offering unlimited storage for free to legacy customers.

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By the time I read this, they appear to have already changed the plan to include a similar deal for legacy customers.

I think we’ll see this increasingly often with products that have a cloud service attached. The business model where you sell a piece of equipment and get paid once and then you have to keep paying monthly hosting fees so your customers can use it for free doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the long term.

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They have changed this, anyone who registers a Cricut by the end of this year will have unlimited uploads.

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I am curious to see what the limit on this is and when the limit will be reached. The number of subscriptions one person or family can have though would seem limited. They all add up so quickly and it seem like everything is going to subscription models not just tech/software. Maybe it will be good as it will just be tons of competition for limited budget and all subscription fees will just fall.

I am pretty confident that this was the plan all along.

Now they’re getting a ton of press and appearing “reasonable” and that they “listen to our customers”, while also pivoting the business as planned. Now they can sell hardware at rock bottom prices and still have a nice residual stream, they got exactly what they wanted, a Gillette/printer model with lock in.

They knew people would yell. At least this way they’re yelling about them and the end result for all the people who were mad is “ok fine I guess”.

unlikely that it was planned, if you read the subreddit they made so many enemies in the past week it sent a wave of existing and future customers to competing silhouette.
I think that even after their retraction many existing customers are left with bad taste in their mouth.
the “apology” was standard “we took your feedback to heart, we are listening etc.”

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on a different point, I found this very relevant to GF from a few perspectives, 1st of all the difference a personal relationship such as the one @dan created with us makes, GF has strong base of devotees that are very vocal and supportive of most GF initiatives. with Cricut, although it is a very loved machine, the company has assumed the role of a ruthless, soul-less corporation stepping on their user on the way to a big IPO.
more important, I think this supports my theory that selling 100% cloud based hardware cannot sustain the growth of a company without finding a second revenue stream.
selling a cloud-based hardware, in fact, becomes a liability: the better the machine it is, the more it gets used, the more it cost the company.
consumables are important, but unless you force users to use your consumables (very unpolular decision taken by some printers, 3D printers and others) that’s not enough.
I can think of many cloud based hardware companies that failed or had to pivot. can’t think of anyone that succeeded on hardware alone.

Just because it might work out to be a bad plan doesn’t mean it wasn’t the plan.

Cricut is a company whose sole purpose is to make and sell their machines and services. They think more about this stuff and have access to more data than any armchair analyst redditors by a landslide.

I’m not advocating blind trust here, but it seems off the mark to think Cricut didn’t consider all of how this would play out before they went forward with it. It’s literally what they do fulltime, and @random_redditlord76 is not even remotely on the same level.

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Interesting: they seem to have walked it back completely now:

(tl:dr: they are abandoning the plan to limit uploads at all … for now, anyway.)

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