While that is subjective have you ever looked at files on etsy? While several are simple enough they are all top quality.
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It’s more the “to get the premium service at a reasonable price, you have to commit now” that makes me cranky. That coupon shouldn’t expire.
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Something like this could be totally cool, but I’m not 100% sure of the feasibility. I may be wrong, but usually those designs have to be approved of, to protect against potential abuse against the character/team, morality, message, etc., don’t they?
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They do. Print speed is not affected.
This upgrade only speeds up the time spent “processing” and “calculating precision movements” before the print starts. I think in three years I’ve had less than a half-dozen prints where that time was noticeable. Those were several hour engraves, an extra 30 seconds before I can press the button is negligible.
If that time is slowing down your business, however, then it might be worth paying to speed it up.
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redacted.
anywho…
In a perfect world it wouldn’t. But they have to keep a source of income going, and I believe the $50 /month is what they have calculated it is going to take to make this method work.
If not enough people are interested, well, I don’t like to think of that.
I would subscribe at the $50/month just to support the company. But not everyone can do that right now. I’m hoping the discounts they offer don’t cost them too much.
Anyway, I hope it works. I’d like to see Glowforge be around for a long time, and if they can make enough to do it by offering an optional subscription service, I’m game.
For people selling their designs for a royalty - $50 a month is nothing, and barely covers the cost of the people needed to do the paperwork and prep. With 30,000 units out there you could pick up a lot of money for a popular file, even if only a third of the people bought it.
But I’ll take a discount if it’s offered…I’m not crazy. 
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agreed, i was saying this is a $60 a YEAR value not $50 a month, those are adobe prices and glowforge doesn’t even have a 10th of the value features of what adobe offers.
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No and no. Cloud services like these are spun up on an as-needed basis automagically. Time on faster processors is more expensive than basic nodes with slower processors and less memory. Nothing is idle, and the sys admins don’t have to do anything to make it happen. The wonders of the 21st Century!
Suffer? Really?
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I get the impression you’ve never priced out server costs.
I’m going to do something completely meaningless and unscientific and random, but maybe illustrative. I’m going to Google Cloud Pricing Calculator and typing in some arbitrary numbers, you can follow along. I want to be super clear: I have ZERO idea how or what Glowforge provisions or how much they pay for their cloud computing. I work for the cloud company they use, and I don’t want anyone to think I’m somehow peeking behind the curtain – I don’t even have access to that kind of information and if I made the slightest attempt to get it, I would be quickly and appropriately fired. This is just a little game and a demonstration.
Let’s pick, for fun, 100 servers 'cause it’s a round number. And we’ll make them “compute optimized” because compute sounds like the whole point of the thing. I don’t know which size to get, so picking the middle of the road “c2-standard-16 (vCPUs: 16, RAM: 64GB)”. Let’s add GPUs because graphics processing sounds important. Minimum number seems to be 2. I don’t know anything about graphics chips so I’ll leave it on “NVIDIA Tesla K80”. Local SSD… let’s imagine that’s not important so just give it one drive. Don’t care about location, leave Iowa there. Running 24/7. Add to estimate.
Ouchies. Again, I don’t have a clue what the actual parameters are for Glowforge’s usage. The only thing I can guarantee are that these number are completely random nonsense. I’m just pointing out how costs add up. And for even more fun, let’s say we want to have some more premium servers. Go back and change to the biggest one, because after all it shouldn’t cost more to have a more powerful machine: c2-standard-60 (vCPUs: 60, RAM: 240GB). And we’ll change the GPU to a P100 with 4 dies. I don’t know the difference but that’s a bigger number so it must be good. How does this change our price?
Hoo doggie. I think I’ve got the vapors.
Now I don’t want to keep playing this one note, there are plenty of more interesting discussions about whether the feature set is worth $X/month. I have no commentary there. But I do object to the notion that it costs Glowforge nothing to run the backend services for us, or that they’re somehow being deceptive about the “fast lane” stuff. When they say they upgraded to faster servers for everyone, I believe them. And when they say that they are making even faster servers available for paying customers, I believe them there too. Why? Because that’s how the damn cloud works. If you’ve architected your system that way, it’s pretty easy to have multiple pools of machines and route requests to the appropriate ones. But it’s also really fargling expensive and it makes sense for this to be a paid option.
Nobody is being slowed down. They already sped it up for everyone. So out of all the complaints about Premium, I honestly think this is the least defensible.
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If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that giving Glowforge money because you hope they’re going to release something is not a good plan.
If they do release something useful in a $50/month package, it’s going to get turned on and off a lot. It’s just not a sensible price point unless you make your living with the machine. (I don’t, but I’m not sure I see anything in there that’s worth that much even if I did.)
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I can appreciate that . … but I don’t appreciate this: “It has to do with the fee tiers they pay for Google Cloud processing. Premium users’ processing will be done on the higher-speed servers that cost Glowforge more to use.”
Since you work “in the industry,” you should know that yes, faster processor instances with more memory do in fact coast more.
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Great post with a clear example.
Plus you saved me the time and effort to write up a similar post. 
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All I know is Dan has said it was a lot more expensive to move over to the faster machines. Not gonna argue about companies giving stuff away for free; we all like free stuff, but they need to be able to stay in business, and having a cloud-dependent machine that I love using means I very much want them to. 
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The fonts and icons are from nounproject.com which we can get for free… Are we keeping those are getting better graphics?
I’ve come across a few where lines are not merged / union - which makes a big deal when engraving… Would be great to see that improved.
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If I sign up for $14.99 but need to cancel for a couple months, can I re-new at the $14.99 price point?
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Noun Project does need a paid subscription for some features and uses.
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redacted.