Discussion of September Announcement

No problem, you just have to remove the medium from anything thicker than 1/4"…you’ll heal right?

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Good catch, fixed!

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Great chart too! Very clear comparisons. Thank you!

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Export is most welcome, as is sorting! And those new catalog designs are super sweet.

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Is anyone else not liking the sound of the “Fast Lane”? I don’t find it plausible that “supercomputers” were purchased and are being reserved for people willing to pay more. Does this mean they’ll remain idle when premium-paying users don’t need them? That would be very surprising from a systems administration standpoint.

Maybe premium users will be serviced using the same server-side hardware and algorithms as the rest of us, but their jobs will just get pushed to the front of the queue.

A more welcome announcement would be, “Hey we just added some faster computers to our processing pool, and now everyone’s prints will go 20% faster.”

How I interpret this announcement is, “Hey, we’ve decided to save money by only upgrading our processing capacity for a very limited set of users willing to pay more. Everyone else will just have to suffer with the same server technology we’ve been using for the past three years.”

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Didn’t they just do that?

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Glowforge print processing is handled by Google Cloud. Glowforge pays for compute services based on performance like any other customer. They can choose to forward Premium customers’ jobs to resources with higher performance, for a higher fee.

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My understanding is that there is a separate section of Google cloud services with faster servers. They cost more to run, so that’s part of the subscription price we’ll be paying.

Shouldn’t impact anyone who chooses not to subscribe. It’s just a faster option for those doing calculation heavy prints. My prints generally don’t need it. For someone running intricate prints with a lot of nodes, it will save a lot of waiting time while the job is processed.

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Are we able to use referral credits to pay for the subscription?

And wouldn’t this be an October update?

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Since they’re using Google Cloud offerings I don’t expect they own any servers. They’ve probably contracted for a certain machine profile and as demand ramps up, Google spins up a new virtual machine matching that profile. They likely have throughout parameters that trigger automatic server provisioning and when demand drops, Google drops instances.

The new “supercomputer” capacity is likely just a new higher performance server profile that will get instances spun up or down based on demand.

With typical cloud implementations the customer only pays for compute used.

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Extraordinarily unlikely. Why would they lie about that?

Here’s the wholesale pricing, you can see for yourself: https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing. Note the higher-end machines are orders of magnitude more expensive. And Glowforge probably uses some specialized GPU processing, which gets even more costly.

Part of the whole point of cloud services is that you (as in Glowforge) can spin up and spin down servers very quickly to accommodate demand. So most likely they’re not paying for idle machines, and it’s not a big deal from a system administration standpoint, because that’s exactly how modern software is deployed.

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No, I’m pretty sure they are on different platforms. (I remember someone asking one of the GF folks recently about it.)

You’re right! Where did September go? :smile:

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I’d really like a bit of clarification on one particular line in the summary above, since (based on my read ) it is not specifically mentioned in the announcement.

Does this mean that we are allowed to sell printed copies of the designs that are free with the subscription, or is this granting a broader license to sell other items that have been printed?

(And if that is the case, does that mean that we’re NOT licensed to do so with other items, such as ones we have created? I don’t think that’s what is intended, but I’d like some clarification.)

Separately, while a discounted price of $14.99 / month is not bad, It’s higher than I (as a rather casual user of late) would like to pay. I’ll still probably do it, at least for now, but the likelihood that I cancel is far greater at that price.

I have to say there is no way I’d end up paying $50 / month, especially when the entire Adobe Creative Suite license price is $52.99 / month.

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What’s concerning is there have been dozens of people having issues with their GF being slow to load or home over the past few weeks. And now we are hearing that in order to keep the speeds we have now, we have to pay for this fast lane correct?

I am concerned with the reliability of the machines I have seen countless customers have similar hardware issues with the glowforge units. And with an refusal to provide anything but email only support it is troublesome. With people having issues weeks after receiving there machine and then struggling with support, it would have been nice to see changes or announcements in these areas. Is chat and phone support going to be a premium feature as well? Because it might be an easier pill to swallow if we knew we could get live answers for hardware issues.

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They didn’t BUY supercomputers; they pay fees to use Google Cloud for processing. The fees are higher for the fastest processors.

I guess you missed last month’s announcement. That’s very close to verbatim. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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No. The recent move to faster processing for everyone isn’t going away; this is just another step up for the premium users.

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Phone support is exponentially more expensive to provide. The cost of our machines would have to be a LOT higher to support that.

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What a crock of CRAP! Pay $5000 for something then they want us to pay $50 more a month . . . I don’t do Adobe subscription and I refuse to pay for this! Ri-Dam-Diculous

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It has to do with the fee tiers they pay for Google Cloud processing. Premium users’ processing will be done on the higher-speed servers that cost Glowforge more to use.

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How about those of us that helped you from the kickstarter get this for the life of the machine for free? I waited forever on this thing, and was shocked how bare bones it remained for so long… In the beginning you also spoke of us being able use other software eventually with it? I mean, I went pro and waited years… or at least offer me a yearly price I can work with… Right now idk about adding a subscription to something I can’t use right now, was furloughed this year due to covid and money has been tight. Back at work for now but things are slow. I love the idea but you are leaving a bunch of us out in the cold that funded you in the very beginning!!! I’m a brand loyal customer and always buy proof grade, have been overall happy with my investment, but really sad it lacks a basic coordinate system, everything is based on scaling… like what about some gcode type stuff. I want a 3x3 square but by the time I draw it up and import it it’s 2.950? It’s been a rough day and I just found out about this, I’d love to subscribe but don’t see that being a reality for me between now and November…

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