To be fair, a lot of people aren’t here for discussion, they’re here to watch all the people complain.
My new car still doesn’t have the steering wheel that I was promised when I bought it, but they are offering an upgrade to heated leather seats, for a price.
Now I remember why I stopped participating here.
I’m one of the lucky ones, I guess. My machine has operated perfectly fine since I received it in 2017.
i won’t disagree with you that there are users who are very much cheerleaders who will spin positive to an extreme. but they’re very outnumbered by people who do the opposite. i’m not necessarily a fan of either extreme.
GF has warts, it’s run by humans. and it’s a company, so their goal has to be to be profitable, even if they have other goals as well. they’ve made mistakes, i’ve commented on them here and elsewhere.
where i take issues is where people make claims based on nothing but speculation and presumption. i’ll point those out. but i’ll also say things like, “yeah, $50/mo is ridiculous.” on the flipside, i’ll also say, “but the chances of them ever asking people to pay $50/mo is equally ridiculous, it’s just a stupid MSRP trick.” and stupid is the right word. playing the “look at your big discount from the fake real price” game has bitten them in the *** this time.
one big difference between the two groups is the cheerleaders generally hang around and try to be helpful, imperfect tho they may be. most of bashers are drive by-bashers. and a not insignificant number of those who do hang around mostly complain and don’t spend time helping others.
not saying that covers everyone, it doesn’t. it’s a broad generalization and there are more than a few who have hammered GF at times are also contributors who help other users and share info/techniques/etc. but as a broad generalization, i stand by it because i don’t think it’s unfair.
Don’t think I have ever defended or trashed the company. It’s not in my nature. Sometimes folks think I’m taking one position or the other but it’s usually me disagreeing with their assumptions. And apparently most people don’t like to be disagreed with. So, have often irritated both sides of that coin. Good thing it doesn’t bother me in the least.
True 'nuf. People don’t like being asked for facts that back up their positions. And real facts too - no alternate facts can apply. Especially those coming from people who know nothing about what they’re making assumptions about except what leaks into the general consciousness (like “computers get faster & cheaper” or “corporations are out to s***w everyone so the owners can become billionaires”).
So if you push back and they have to defend “what I heard” or “everyone knows” or “people say” then they resort to incoherent argumentation. Since they weren’t interested in finding out the facts in the first place, it seems fruitless to try to change their minds.
I wish I knew this before bought my GF last month. I would have considered another company since all things become equal when your designing outside of the GF interface…
For GF to think their software and library is worth $50 a month, their dreaming. i’m in agreement of the expected cost of two venti drinks or about $9.99 a month. and to think you’re paying $50 a month for what’s in the design store to use now, but the rest to come is pure speculation if it’s going to be good or usable…
Dan - highly recommend you and the team reconsider your business case on this and the value to the customer. By now you’ve collected a lot of “Voice of the Customer” comments. Time to reevaluate your products worth.
I am what you would call a hobbyist who bought my GF when it was first announced. My use is infrequent enough that tonight was the first time since the premium pricing was announced that I logged in.
I find the $50/mo price is unrealistic. Compounded by the follow up of hey thanks for being one of our first customers we will discount it to $14.99/mo which in turn feels like what a reasonable starting price could be. So I am left feeling not special and the whole 70% off feels hollow and disingenuous. What would have made me sign up is "we are launching at $15/mo and to thank you for being one of our first customers we will discount it to $10/mo for your first year.
100 servers to service 30k GFs, when the GFs are idle 99% of the time, and the 1% they work, only maybe 5% is used to prepare prints? 100 servers? With 16 cores each? 1600 cores running concurrently 24/7 to service 30k devices?
Your numbers don’t even remotely make sense, making the entire exercise futile.
Any hero worship I felt for the GF team died during the two year delay and the PR disasters during the wait. They’re just people like anyone, and I predict their $50/mo is going to be a huge flop. Then again, I’m just people like anyone.
Indeed! We’re continuously discussing and learning from the feedback that we’re getting. And we still have lots to learn as our original launch discount will expire, as we add new features and designs, etc.
I should note that, as you might expect, big public forums tend to attract a small percentage with of folks with strong opinions, and don’t represent the entirety of our customer base. Our surveys, email inbox, and other communications channels help us paint a fuller picture.
Indeed, we’re just folks like anyone else. We make our share of mistakes and try to learn from them as quickly as we can.
I kinda think the same applies to YOUR numbers. 
We all have our own perspective, the lens we see our world through. That focus is a result of our life’s experience, which makes it distinctly individual. Because I don’t agree with someone’s or they with mine doesn’t invalidate either one. Difficult not to argue with someone trying to do so, but let’s all try to be a bit more understanding that others see the world differently from their own perspective.
Personally, I wouldn’t describe the product as “shitty”, but that’s through my own lens. In my view the glowforge is one of the most capable specialized tools I own, but my experience with it has been practically flawless.
I have no idea what the future plans for the premium package is, but an announced price of $50 to discount against strikes me as far off the mark, and right next to an insult to my intelligence.
It’s really no different from "Get $1500 cash back on this truck!" (it’s your own money) or any other routine marketing ploy, like the clock in the corner of the advertisement counting down your diminishing opportunity.
I’m going to sign up and ride with the discount until I don’t see the value in the option.
(Wait… I need to refill my popcorn)
Dan posted somewhere that the average number of prints per owner per day is two.
June was a million prints. A little over 33,000 per day; 2 prints per day indicates 16.5k machines.
However, back to @chris1’s example above. He’s not trying to guess what the costs are to Glowforge. He has no idea - and he said that. It was simply illustrative of how processing adds up - and seemingly adds up at a rate greater than the faster processing makes up for (not a 1:1 scale from slow processing to fast processing, thus quashing the faster processing ultimately costs less because it’s less processing time).
to be fair, a sheet of 50 ear savers is one print. 
Yes, I should have quoted further down rather than what appeared in the link preview, where he mentioned a million prints, not just a million ear savers. On the phone so it’s not as easy to quote from other threads 
The 2 per day stat was a recent post over something like the previous week, not from his announcement back in June.
Then don’t pay for the subscription. It will still work exactly the same as it did the last time you turned it on.
It doesn’t.
And there is a significant used market for these. Not sure if you are only willing to do local, or asking too much, or what, but people seem to have no problems selling them.
No, you don’t.
but slower.