I stretched to get this machine and the basic quality of life upgrades like text and outlines make it so much more enjoyable to use. I’m super bummed out that it is going to be behind a steep paywall. I can’t justify paying a monthly fee for it. Honestly knowing simple things like that are there but I don’t get access after the high cost of purchasing the machine up front taints the whole thing for me. This and proofgrade material always sold out make me really regret the purchase. I am having a hard time deciding to keep the machine and be regularly frustrated or sell it and eat the lose.
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Before the premium features were introduced - like way back when… many of us used this file as a way to quickly include a line, circle, square, etc. https://community.glowforge.com/t/cut-shapes-template/7423T
The outline feature is easy to duplicate in Inkscape, but requires advance planning. As for materials, proofgrade stuff is top notch, but most of the items can be sourced cheaper elsewhere. I hope you give your Glowforge a little more time. You had a reason to purchase, and that didn’t include the premium features because they didn’t exist when you got your machine 16 months ago.
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So often this is the case as anyone with empathy has a better sense of right and wrong than any hard fast rule.
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And that’s fine, but the truth is we’ve not yet printed from the supposed “slow lane” and have no way of knowing how much worse it will be until we choose not to stay on Premium.
If the answer is “your prints will be as fast as they were before the mass-Trial of Premium”—fine with me. But if it’s much slower, by design, to get me to pay a premium sub to send files eleven feet away… I’ll ask why can’t I just skip the Glowforge servers and print directly to my machine?
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Correct.
It’s not physically possible given the current configuration of the machine.
(You would have to buy a new laser cutter if they came out with it in some hypothetical Glowforge V2. And that would likely be twice as expensive than what you paid for this one.)
Maybe if there’s enough interest in it, they might develop a “Glowforge Two Point Oh” in a few years, but I wouldn’t count on it now. They are still developing the first one. 
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Thanks for providing clarity here, appreciate it. So long as I can import my own SVGs and print with the same relative speed I’ve always done, I’m a happy camper.
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Those all would be valid points (I will explain later), however, Glowforge made poor engineering decisions and is now passing the cost of them on to the user. They chose not to include end stops, causing poor repeatablility. Yes the processing time isn’t that much of a difference, but hopefully you don’t want to batch out a handful of the same thing because we are going to reprocess that file every single time. This goes for snapmarks as well. They are a compromise for not having the repeatability you could get from having end stops, or some other way to set a position for the laser without using images taken through a wide angle lens.
My initial reaction to this decision to ask users to pay for a premium plan was:
- Good for them to expand their income stream, but who are they targeting at $50 a month?
- You are going to try to hold me hostage at $15 a month for features I do not want now (but may want later) as a reward for being an early customer?
I moved on with my life without a second thought, until today I recieved an email telling me that my designs would be erased from the cloud storage after 30 days of inactivity. This is what invalidates many of the arguments I see defending glowforge. Most the things they advertise as premium features make sense to limit for those who pay for premium accounts. Cloud storage does not. I am the definition of a basic level user, but it sure is nice to log on to my machine and pull up an old job and run it again (at this point, this is one of the main redeeming features of this machine). Yes I can remember to save and download the project to preserve any updates I made, and then find and reupload the file when I want to use it 31 days later, but as everyone has claimed, didn’t we pay a premium because this laser is supposed to be easy to use? I reuse a lot of the same designs, but will regularly go a month or two without cutting them (as I said, I am not a premium level user). Using this machine was already a hassle because of the amount of time spent waiting for a page to load, and then waiting to focus, and then waiting for the design to process (don’t forget you have to walk over and press the button). Now I have to remember to save and download every time I make changes, or I lose my work. Whether intentional or not, this breaks the machine for many users who chose not to pay for premium accounts. I can purchased several terabytes of storage for $10 a month depending on the service I use, why should I have to pay $50 to make sure my designs don’t get erased?
Now you may think to argue that running cloud storage and paying for server time is expensive. While that may be true, those costs either should have been build into the price of the laser, or they should have been upfront about having to pay for basic features eventually, or the should not have tied themselves so exclusively to the cloud. I think they chose not to do any of those things because they would have had to price themselves out of their target market.
I see a lot of users defending Glowforge on here constantly. It is ok for you to like and support the company, but also be critical of bad decision making. They have chosen to break the laser for basic users here and I believe it is because their business model has proven to be unsuccessful. I am open to other suggesions, but this 30 day design thing is sending a really bad message, and I wonder if we are seeing the beginning of the end. Hopefully they realize it was a mistake and correct it, and hopefully I am totally off on my assessment of the situation.
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Nope, not for Legacy users.
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All this uproar over the “slow lane” is really not worth the time to type about it. I have been using the machine for a couple years now and while there has been a lot of increased speed in how long it takes to get from pushing go on the GFUI to the machine button lighting up has improved noticeably it did so long before the Premium vs not Premium was a shadow of a thought, very much less noticeable than the improvements that are the “no Premium” speeds now.
After you press the button, all the speeds are fixed by the universe and not changed even slightly for the same result.
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Ok, that is good news. Thank you for the clarification. I wonder why they included that in the email they sent out to legacy users if they didn’t intend to take that feature away. I still think the policy of erasing files after 30 days is punishing basic level users (just new ones this time). I get that they have to pay for cloud space, but you could work that policy in a way that is more supportive of their customers. I think what fusion360 did where you could have x number of active files would make a lot of sense in this case.
But Glowforge is not limiting the number of “active” files like fusion360, you could have 50 active files that have been used in less than 30 days.
For our group’s video conference based happy hour (our group is already spread around the globe) folks wanted me to call from our goats’s pen. That was insanity sitting on a call with 4 goats jumping all over me (trying to bite the camera). Unlike a dog who in general will listen to “no”, goats are essentially untrainable, and don’t care about your wishes. Goats don’t also grasp the concept of “camera” - and don’t even really have a “looking at” since they have spherical vision…
Right after this cute shot, he bit me on my left carotid artery… Man that hurt (luckily didn’t break the skin), while they don’t have top teeth their bottom teeth and bite can easily snap a 1/4" branch…
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It is nice to see said goat looking so healthy and mischievous after the recent urgent care episode.
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Hahaha awww, the goat looked so happy! Glad you are ok from the love bite 
He’s clearly suffering from a stress disorder (I guess by this point his ASD has converted, it is technically PTSD) which mostly he displays avoidant behaviors, but he is no longer the carefree zany goat he was. He has somewhat thrown the herd into disarray, as he isn’t the brave alpha he was, so butterscotch (the other slightly younger adult) has been acting up and sort of displaying the alpha behaviors. Oreo one of the baby girls also has been showing some alpha behaviors and is now finally big enough to stick up for herself with butterscotch. She mostly gets away with challenging him using the maniac technique, where clearly there is a big size difference, she goes on the attack and tries to gore him from below. I guess he figures it’s like being 25 and a 9-year-old attacks you with a chainsaw. You’re not quite sure what’S but anyone crazy enough to do that is crazy! It’s like one of the barn cats Pippi will take on pretty much any intruding animal from the forest. She knows she is an apex predator and will just attack. We watched her take on another apex predator, a red-fox (who ate a bunch of our hens) and she just stalked and attacked right in front of my wife. The fox looked terrified figuring anything that was much smaller than he was that was willing to flat out try and murder him clearly had mad ninja skills. We always joke that the reason the barn is bear free is Pippi killed them all! The other adult barn cat, woody is the barn’s Walmart greeter. He clearly runs the place, but can’t understand why she runs off into the woods to kill a squirrel when gets food in a dish. But since Pippi is off making the woods safe for humanity and woody would probably greet a]the barn mice, we just got a new kitten (Jill) who will be the actual barn cat when she is bigger than the mice.
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I don’t know what circumstances I’d ever use that line, but I’m going to try and remember it just in case it’s ever fitting.
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I know, I am suggesting that this is a better option. I imagine it would be more beneficial to users to have a handful of files that are protected, and delete/archive ones they will likely not use again than to have them automatically get erased if they did not use it for 30 days.
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I agree with you on that one and am very thankful I don’t have to worry about it.
Protected on your hard drive?
I think what people are saying above is, kind of like on a DVR for Dish or DirecTV, you have the option to “protect” a show if you don’t want it deleted automatically but don’t have time to watch it right now. Then, when your “unprotected” shows are on there for too long, they get deleted, but protected shows stick around for you. Dashboard files should be that way as well. There should be a way to “protect” it on your dashboard.