This is me betting that if someone lapses and gets the 50/month option only when they try to resubscribe, they can email support and support will go “normally it’s 50 dollars per month but I got the authorization to offer it to you at the 15/month price again.” Same thing they invariably do when selling someone a refurb at a special one time only price. 
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Facts of the Day:
Nobody is losing anything…
Basic has not slowed down.
Basic still has 100% of the functions it had 6 months ago (and many more than 3 years ago).
Premium is an optional service…
No one is forcing you to subscribe.
If you are reading this in early October, your price is currently $15/mo, NOT $50!
If you don’t want/need the additional features, don’t subscribe. Nobody will be offended.
Other very successful businesses using similar pricing models:
- Spotify
- Dropbox
- Box
- SurveyMonkey
- Evernote
- Autodesk’s SketchBook Pro for iPad
- Slack
- Zoom
Glowforge is a for-profit company, not FOSS / NPO.
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I did bitmap trace a few images to turn them into vectors but then I deleted them so maybe that’s it.
Dan said somewhere that the paid subscription belongs to a person’s account, not the machine. So I don’t think it would transfer if you sold. (Imagine you have two machines, you still only have one owner account to run them. Selling one off doesn’t change anything else in your account status)
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I wish they would be more than one type of subscription. I have to admit I am a bit sad that the mirror and basic shapes options are premium features.
I can understand for images, font, faster compute, storage. I think they are definite perks but how long is the 14.99$ is going to last if you subscribe? forever or that will be 50$ for everyone in a year ? 50$ is steep especially if you don’t live in the US the exchange is pretty brutal for Canada 68$ more expensive than my internet or my phone bill.
On a positive note my favorite addition was the outline tool and I have enjoyed the images despite some of them not being merge properly so overlap lines are creating gaps. The added measurement has been a good addition but we are still missing a proper alignment tool if we are going toward the Cricut model.
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The $14.99 rate keeps going until you cancel.
The current discount offer is going to be billed for the upcoming month from the credit card that you give them. If you cancel before the month, no charge to your card.
If you then decide 6 months later that you want back in, you just purchase again, at whatever the current rate is for the service.
So if you want to keep the $14.99 for a couple months to see if they add something you like…you can do that. Just cancel when you’ve had enough.
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It is a good comparison except the fact that all those services doesn’t involve a peripheral investment. The closest model would be the Cricut and the Silouhette model where you have a set of basic set of features and you pay for custom images/project and fonts.
It’s a bit harder to digest for people who are used to that as the Cricut maker is 500-600$ and their premium access is 9.99$ on the other end I don’t think Cricut give you the selling rights to product you make with their images which would grant the extra cost but the basic features do involve basic shapes, alignment and mirroring as the basic as well as a few fonts.
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I’m not going to argue that I didn’t need the geometric shapes (other than a line - i.e. a laser saw) since I do all my work in external programs almost 100% of the time and really only need the motion-planning/control functions (personally I don’t need little cutesy icons, I would prefer file organization). But as someone who works for a software company things that seem simple and should be “free” are often surprisingly expensive to maintain. I recently found out a simple service I was using internally for a project that I figured was some summer intern’s baby was a $12m/year expense to maintain. We have no idea what they’ve based their pricing on. Not being in the “defend mode” here, just saying you can certainly feel $600 is too much, but then again expecting them to do new development (and eat the licensing costs) is not how commercial enterprises work. Now you may feel that say $10/month is totally fine for the content, but someone else might feel that $10 is too much, so then we are left solely with well what price would you judge to be fair. The non-commercial license for the majority of the designs makes it a much less valuable set of assets. But all that being said, you don’t need to spend a dime on any of this to use your glowforge with all of the features you currently have.
The exact same argument happened on the inventables website when inventables shipped Easel Pro for a $120/year fee. The only “real” pro feature they added was a set of fonts (yawn, easy to download fonts to your computer for free) and V-carving (huge complicated functionality). Now they took a slightly different approach to pricing than Glowforge which was you can do 4-days/month for free of v-carving. Now if you can work within that limitation then great, you don’t need to spend the money, if you can’t well that has a cost. And if it wasn’t worth it, people wouldn’t go out and by V-Carve Pro for $600 from Vectric (it does add a lot other than more sophisticated v-carving - including full 3D capability)
Since GF is decidedly not an open source company we don’t really have an idea of what it takes for them to do stuff. I imagine if it was an OSS company the community would have built the drawing tools and contributed them back a long time ago. The clipart stuff obviously needed licensing and that costs real money (whether you care or not is obviously your own personal use case - i could care less mostly). As far as recommending GF if you are basing it solely on the cost of an optional service, that would be like saying for the x-carve, that while easel is free, V-carve Pro is very expensive; yes it is, but you don’t need it, and many people do amazing stuff with easel without paying a dime for pro. Obviously if you are running a business that needs v-carving hard to believe you couldn’t justify that expense, and you would just bake that price into your price (as we all assume Glowforge is doing with premium - google charges them $X for compute services and they pass that along to us).
From a price standpoint I don’t disagree that their software seems more expensive than the competition (let’s use Lightburn which has almost identical functionality as an example). Glowforge is 10X the price almost. That does say that they probably have expenses out of line with others, or are taking a larger profit than others. I mean I have no idea how much google compute they purchase, but the noun project is about $40/yr for unlimited license, so that’s a small fraction of the cost. Not sure what the licensing fees for the design of the month run, but since they are non-commercial (mostly) presumably not crazy high, which solely leaves cloud fees and their own internal dev burn rate.
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Traced bitmaps are purely vectors so should not take extraordinary space. However they can be terribly optimized compared to vectors to start. Always a good idea to look at the file in inkscape/illsutrator and get a node count. I have had files where the embedded artwork stayed (even after I thought I had deleted it, making the file huge with essentially dead data)
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Since people mentioned outages, I work for Google Cloud 
We have outages from time to time you can always check this page here if you run into issues as this might not be the Glowforge’s team fault at all 
https://status.cloud.google.com/
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Ooooh! That is handy…thank you! 
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(not being arugmentative, genuinely trying to understand) Are you saying that a machine that costs 600%-1500% more should have a similarly priced subscription software price to the cheaper machine?
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I’ll keep that in mind thanks !
Then in your case I’d suggest not subscribing. Instead, take advantage of the new export capability (which is available to all users, not just premium) so you can do those things in an external editor and then re-upload.
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I believe that you do need to put a credit card on file to access the free designs, although you can use them and cancel before you’re charged on Nov 3.
I’m so sorry it wasn’t clear! The $15/month rate doesn’t expire, it’s yours as long as you want it.
The discount is attached to your personal account, which cannot be transferred.
Converting bitmaps to vectors can create incredibly complicated vectors that can cause all sorts of trouble, depending on the settings. Saying something like “95% accuracy” instead of “99% accuracy” will give similar results but be much faster to process.
Thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, about Tuesday morning… 
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I’ll be happy to answer that one though it wasn’t directed at me. The price of the machine itself has no bearing on the premium software service. I could argue that the cricut design space sofware (which is FREE) is more capable than the current glowforge software (with premium tools). So there needs to be a lot more value-add from other things for glowforge’s subscription to be worth significantly more than the cricut subscription. I just don’t think the unlimited space for your library, and additional speed warrants the extra price. The free design catalog… depends on who you are and what you are looking for out of your glowforge. I personally have never printed anything from any of the catalogs except the gift of good measure when I first got it. So for ME that value-add isn’t really any value. What does premium get you with cricut? 30,000+ premium images, 50% off digital purchases and an additional 10% off of any hardware/tools/physical products you may buy. That’s a good value-add for 9.99/mo if you plan on buying vinyl or a new machine or anything else physical from them in the year. That could easily pay for itself in short order.
So yeah… the hardware means nothing. We’re comparing the service itself. And sadly, even with premium, I’d say GF service is sorely lacking to justify anything REMOTELY close to 50 dollars per month. And in my opinion is shy of being worth 15/mo as well. When you compare it to the cricut service and sofware, it isn’t even 10/mo. But I wouldn’t be too put out at 15/mo as, like with cricut, you really aren’t able to use anything BUT the service you are locked into. And since @dan has said they are working on expanding the value-adds for premium it’s worth keeping an open mind about where things are going. They’ve never failed to come out with regular updates giving us new and better features over the year that I’ve had mine so I don’t have any reason to believe that it won’t continue in the future.
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I agree with most of your points, I asked the question only because the poster had specifically called out the price of the Cricut and I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be applicable.
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Yeah I don’t know and can’t speak for them. But the hardware obviously has no bearing on it as no matter what it is, if there’s a software service attached to it, it’s merely a delivery method for the software.
For instance, my corvette was 60,000 dollars and I pay 15 dollars per month for a mobile wifi hotspot for it. But a 15,000 dollar chevy spark also has a mobile hotspot and also runs 15/mo. The vehicle itself is just the delivery method for the service.
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Hello there Henry,
I was already waiting for your comment, as you being a frequent poster. This thread is started here to hear our opinion isn’t it? So we gave our opinion, you did and I did, that’s it.
I love freedom of speech so to say. My opinion did not change and I rather do not repeat myself, so I leave this thread for now.
As I was reading some of the other comments, I had an epiphany of what I think is a great analogy for the service and the premium benefits.
Think about the Glowforge as an airline ticket. Whether we bought it far in advance (and had to wait for it’s delivery) via crowdfunding, or bought it recently (7 days before a flight), and whether or not we bought basic economy (with no baggage or meals), bought a plus - standard economy, or paid for premium economy / economy plus / etc, - we all bought a ticker on the a plane taking us to a destination.
The Glowforge Premium service is kind of like they just added a First Class Cabin with extra amenities - wider seats, drinks included, extra luggage, a special check in lane, etc. They did this, however, without taking away any of the amenities that came with the standard / premium economy tickets.
Anyone who chooses not to pay for the premium service and fly first class still gets to travel in the seats they selected and paid for - without losing any amenities. (In fact, some would say that just like someone who has an aisle seat and has someone sitting next to them in the middle seat, if that middle seat person buys an upgrade to first class, the economy class flier gets a benefit too - that space has opened up next to him/her, and s/he gets extra elbow room.)
Glowforge has not cancelled any flights, nor have they taken away boarding access… it’s like when the airlines have a large-body plane with two boarding ramps, one that goes into the first class cabin and one that goes to economy.
Premium travelers / forgers get access to the First Class boarding and additional amenities, but not at the expense of the economy fliers.
For me, I chose to upgrade for $14.99 / month, just like I do (did?) on some longer, cross-country flights, but not if it costs too much. $14.99 is definitely pushing the threshold for me, but I’m ok for now. We’ll see just how much I use it, and I could very well drop off before too long and just fly coach.
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