I find it extremely irritating that Glowforge is forcing me to upgrade to their $50 a month program just so I can upload my own designs that are bigger that 100kb!
Thinking of returning this matching since it has been nothing but a headache
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You don’t require premium to use the machine. If you file won’t load there is something wrong with the file.
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You might think that @beerfaced.
The aura has a 100kb file size limit unless you get premium.
Back when they first introduced premium I said it was only a matter of time before they introduced a feature that made it all but mandatory; no one wanted to believe me.
Well, this is what that looks like.
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Ahh, yeah I keep forgetting there is the Aura out there, of which I know nothing about. When I see the word Glowforge my mind goes automatically to the bigger machines
My bad.
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Yikes! Looking at my PC folder with all of my past Glowforge projects, all SVG files, the majority are much bigger than 100 Kbytes. Not a reasonable limit IMNSHO. 
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If you are using the Glowforge in a business There are a lot of positive things that make it worth it. All the free designs, Magic Canvas, and all the manipulation stuff can fill out a store.
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Well some of that may be true for very specific business types the fact is that this is a hidden significant annual charge.
100 kB is ridiculously small, and the only reason to do it is to squeeze revenue out of people. Maybe Glowforge needs to do that[1], but it is a hidden fee and that’s the problem.
They’re marketing this thing and pricing it toward the low end of the market and then hitting you with an annual all-but-mandatory subscription that is fully half the cost of the machine every single year. This is mental.
Just take a look at their cost cutting measures lately, staff reductions and curtailing support hours are the two latest moves. The SEC filing that failed to go through is also not a great sign… it all points to Glowforge needing to change their financials in a fundamental way, which is a bit concerning. Sure they’ve been trying to drive subscriptions since day one, they need recurring revenue to make themselves appealing to a buyer or to go public — what that SEC filing was all about — but it’s uncool to hide $600 annual fees behind a file size limit. ↩︎
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Perhaps they need a more “craft cutter” like subscription that’s more in the $10 or $20 price range. Something like the Silhouette design studio charge. No need for “fast servers” or other capital intensive expenses, just the same software team working on everything else.
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I would think that the Noun Project and Magic Canvas to say nothing of the “free with premium” stuff might be the biggest daily cost to the company quite aside of the “capital expenses” like paying progammers to create all the other bits and pieces.
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When the subscription system was introduced I pushed for a less expensive mandatory monthly fee model that would have changed the entire economics of the thing, allowing Glowforge to focus on making the best product instead of the one that forced the most subscriptions.
But nobody liked that idea at the time. Heck people probably still don’t like it, but I still think it would have worked out much better than what we have now. It would have mostly decoupled the development of features from the economics of subscriptions and allowed them to address the many longstanding weaknesses of the workflow.
The way it is now, if you ever ask “why don’t they do X or Y”, you can almost always answer it with “does it drive subscriptions or sell proofgrade?”
It’s too bad, I would have liked things like the ability to embed settings in a file, repeat the last job without re uploading, manual exhaust fan control, true pause with lid opening, a proper troubleshooting interface with machine data, better file search interface in the dashboard, uploaded job sharing with other accounts, automatic material test grid generation, and so on. The amount of low hanging fruit in the hopper is massive, but all of these ideas don’t drive subscriptions or sell proofgrade so here we are with functionality gaps.
The only question as to “why don’t they do X or Y” should be “does it make Glowforge better?” It just can’t be that way with this business model.
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I believed you.
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