Discussion of September Announcement

No not necessarily but if we want to appeal to even more user that might be less technically skilled having some of those basic features included might entice more users to purchase a machine in the first place. I think having the selling rights to item created with the images, the faster processing time, free project files, fonts is worth a lot. But I feel that the basic shapes, mirroring features and even the outline tool are in a different category for me. Even having a basic tool set at like 5$ -10$ per month and then the next tier add the images/projects and fonts would maybe suit different users. Also programmers salary doesn’t scale up according to the device price point :wink: but the number of users and eventual subscribers makes a difference.

I can definitely use my machine without them but I would feel I would maybe benefit from the tools on a yearly basis versus maybe using the images/project for some specific periods of the year. Like I don’t pay all the time for my premium cricut access but I would be willing to pay for the tool part on it’s own especially if that helps Glowforge develop even more features that are time saver. Things like packing design in a sheet or shape, aligning/distribution tool, a merge/boolean/grouping tool ect.

I bought the Glowforge because I wanted the ease of mind I know I could deal with a more complicated tool like my 3d printer and it doesn’t have those bell and whistles.

I subscribed anyway :wink: I am just worried that if I want to turn it off for 1-2 months when I am more busy that I will have to come back to paying 50$. It’s an amazing tool and I even regret not buying it before . I still think that offering different payment tiers options might be more profitable potentially. Even adding an option to prepay for a year or 6 months with higher rebate incentives could be interesting options to consider as well.

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Also for the curious here’s some insight about what Google Cloud services are used by Glowforge : https://cloud.google.com/customers/glowforge?hl=en

And that crazy pricing is due to gpu which I don’t think is required for this type of workload :wink: I think our Glowforge would cost much more if they spend that much on servers haha.

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Like I said, the numbers I picked were not meant to be illustrative of anything other than that cloud services cost money, and “faster servers” don’t come anything near free.

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Agreed!

A lot of folks seem really upset about this “fast lane” concept and seem to think it’s going to slow them down.

The best analogy I can think of is the “Nexus” lines when you’re crossing the border.

There you are… in your regular lane… sitting there with everyone else… and you look over and see someone roll right on through the “Nexus” lane. They’ve paid for the privilege, done the interview, got the pass, etc. That option IS available to you… or you can stay in the regular lanes with everyone else.

In other words, your lane didn’t become slower because a “fast lane” was created.

One might even argue that some resources were freed up because the folks using the “fast lane” are no longer queued up in the regular lanes.

The only concern I would have here is if Glowforge units continue to sell and people decide to remain in the “regular lane” and Glowforge (the company) doesn’t expand capacity for the regular people. That would be a disservice to customers and I don’t think Dan and company would do that.

At the end of the day, they want the cloud services to run as smoothly as possible… for everyone.

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$50 is a hard sell for some shapes and graphics that I can get already with a tiny bit of extra work. Fast lane will save me a few seconds per print. I already store my designs on my computer. I do my own designs, so the catalog has no interest to me. Premium must be for different types of makers, but I really can’t see how $50 can justify what you get out of it.

I understand that I can stay at Free for life and nothing is being taken away right now. I really hope this doesn’t start a slippery slope where all new features go into Premium and Free slowly becomes crippled. That would be very frustrating.

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We started using GPU instances earlier this year… and they do run up the bill fast. Especially the extra-fancy ones we use now for Premium.

Indeed. Cloud services make the comparisons more complicated, because we actually add “lanes” constantly as new users log in. Another metaphor is that we’re a car rental company with infinite cars to get you where you’re going, but some folks choose a nice sedan and others upgrade to F1 racecars.

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I would expect most new features to go into Premium. Whereas improvements on what we’ve already paid for should continue to be free.

One exception is any feature that was promised to us at the beginning (DXF import, passthrough software for the pro, etc.) should be free, not part of Premium.

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Are we currently getting the “Fast Lane” print prep during the free trial period, or is that something that isn’t available until/unless we sign up for the premium service? I figure it is not globally active because it would cost a ton to give it to everyone for free, even for a month.

Speaking of server cost. A program run locally on my PC would cost you nothing…just sayin.

It also costs more to develop and support. Not only would they need to make separate Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android versions, they’d have to deal with the headache of supporting various versions of those systems. And then they’d have to deal with the problem of software installation, updates, etc.

Web apps are cheaper to write, deploy, and support. Especially on the customer support side, where the answer is mostly just “try it in the latest version of Chrome.”

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This is a real-time shot of that machine engraving. That and the 150 Watt tube put it in a slightly different league than the GF…

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Plenty of cross platform dev tools that would not necessitate much work supporting Windows, Mac, and Linux. Android and iOS can, frankly, suck it. :slight_smile:

Glowforge has a lot of customers using tablets to submit jobs to their Glowforges. Abandoning a chunk of their customer base is unlikely to be popular.

And it still doesn’t address the problem of clueless customers installing software upgrades. Seriously, the cost savings of customer support not having to walk people through software installation should not be underestimated.

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nobody said it wasn’t in a different league. this (and my response) were to this comment:

GF is not your everyday industrial laser, and because of that, it’s priced at a premium. That’s a major reason why people will pick GF over its less expensive competitors. Its users seek that simplicity.

@jbmanning5’s response and mine were to point out that the GF is not priced at a premium compared to an every day day industrial laser. it’s significantly cheaper than pretty much every industrial laser. mostly because it’s not an industrial laser.

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But couldn’t they at least give us the option? At the moment, the machine even verifies cryptographically whether it’s connected to GFs servers, even if we wanted to we couldn’t write our own replacement software for it…

It’s pretty easy to push updates out to people across multiple platforms these days. And if the software calls the mothership, so-to-speak, to report in versioning and licensing they retain the ability to support it remotely rather easily. As for submitting jobs via android and ios… if the user is smart enough to know how to get the job TO android and ios, they can still do that if they just scaled back their cloud usage to just that small subset of users.

Every one of us that are familiar with these types of cnc machines realize how simple they really are. They are just a control board processing simple commands to move some stepper motors. In the case of lasers, it controls power to the pew pew as well. A 3D printer? Controls a hot end. Router? Controls a spindle. Ultimately they are really simple machines doing simple jobs. Being able to get job sources from two angles shouldn’t be a major hurdle. I almost didn’t get a GF a year ago when I was researching things because of the cloud only software. But I decided to do so because I wanted that simplicity that it advertised. If I were to do so today, having put together a half dozen different such CNC type machines and eyeballing making my own from scratch? I wouldn’t do it. At the time though I was reasonably unfamiliar with how simple they were, how much of a premium I was paying for that ease of use, and how proprietary the system was without much of a “fix it yourself” path there was (that’s getting better at least). One thing that would keep people like me coming back would be allowing a secondary workflow into the machine of local offline software using the wifi in a peer to peer implementation. I’d be real surprised if it weren’t converting those jobs in the cloud to SOME form of g-code that gets sent back down to it. If that’s the case it CAN’T be a difficult ask.

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Given that @Dan has said there is a separate development team working on Premium, I would suspect Print will continue to develop as well, since the Print developers will also need things to work on. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

People can be moved between teams easily. I would imagine more people will move to the Premium team over time as the core product continues to stabilize. Although there will presumably be future generations of products to support in the core software, so that may keep them busy.

This is back to wishing something we’ve all wished, they’re simply not interested in giving us such an option as of 2020. If it’s really important to you another brand of laser might be better for you. It’s clearly not that easy for this hardware, Openglow has been trying to crack it for ages.

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I really just want to know if the current print processing speed during the trial period is regular or fast lane.