As an owner who is primarily a hobbyist, but who uses Snapmarks to run jobs for other small businesses that help get my Glowforge to pay for itself, my position is closest to @kelly1’s. I get an order for a batch of brand engravings every couple months; one of these runs would pay for a year’s worth of Premium at the $15/mo rate, but I definitely don’t do enough to make it worth $50.
From what I’m seeing, it seems like there are 3 main points of friction on Premium: Messaging, incl. “fast lane” wording; removing an element of functionality (Snapmarks) for existing users*; confusing use-case intent for premium subscription.
For the first: I think it needs to be made clearer that jobs aren’t even being routed to the same machines. Not everyone understands the cloud processing/pay-per-cpu-cycle model backing the Glowforge service. The “Commerical rights” list point should also include “Catalog” to make it clearer.
On the second: Snapmarks disappeared from my interface a month or two ago, and I nearly had a panic attack–I was in the middle of a branding run for someone and was using a Snapmark-based jig. I had looked around at the time to see whether they’d be included in Premium, but was only finding the “beta support ending” message. They showed up again after a bit of cache maintenance, and when I didn’t see an explicit note that they were being included in Premium, I thought I didn’t have to worry about them actually disappearing. I understand that this was always a beta feature and not part of the core offering, but they’ve become a huge part of my process. A little more info in the interface about them becoming part of premium would’ve padded the blow.
That dovetails into the third: I can’t tell if “Premium” is intended for cut-but-don’t-design/“home+” use-cases (a la Cricut Access), or for designers/“pro” use-cases. Snapmarks, for example, seem more geared toward the pro side, as does the processing time upgrade, but there’s not much else there so far in that persona’s set of features. I may be off-base, but I’d expect other people making money from their Glowforges to need more in the way of batch tooling, design/project/print run organization and tracking, having more common materials (like Baltic birch plywood) and user-customizable materials in the materials library, and other “productivity” features, but the design, text (as it currently is–having a “mail merge” feature would change this), and clipart features don’t seem like part of that. The catalog probably falls somewhere in-between.
I’m subscribed for now, but I probably won’t stay just for Snapmarks.
*This isn’t exactly the same situation Amy Hoy describes in her article on raising SaaS prices, given that the current price is $0/mo, but it’s not dissimilar.