I’m shocked that there isn’t any conversation on this, yet! Here I am, back from halfway around the world, trying to catch up with the cool new things that I’ve been missing, which of course includes this newest feature, and I’m the first guy to post about it openly?!
Anyway, I wish I were more familiar with the AI prompt world, because it seems like it would make this a way more fun tool to use out of the gate without having to use up your coins. I wanted to see if somebody could help me with deciphering the economy of the coins. From what I can see, anybody, including a dog with an internet connection has access to this tool, but the bottleneck is the amount of times you can use the tool via the craft coins. GF states they’ll deposit coins to you, “We give everyone 500 Craft Coins to start and then another 100 Craft Coins each day that they log in… but as a Glowforge owner you get double these amounts, and if you’re a Premium subscriber you get 10x as many!”
My understanding is that this is a per diem situation, but only on the days that you log in, so they aren’t accumulating endlessly, but specifically distributed on the days you logon. The fine print I am struggling to decipher is whether that is signing into you GF account in general, or specifically the the Magic SVG site. If I come here to check out the latest MoaG post, am I getting coins?
Second, as I am a premium subscriber (have been since it came out, exactly 3 years of paying while not even having access to my lasers 
), I’m trying to understand that conversion. 100 coins x10, so 1000 coins, correct? So say I login for thirty days straight, that’s 30,000 coins!? Since there is very little information on this tool, I’m curious if these coins expire.
It’s also interesting to me that you’re charged coins for each individual design instead of having several options pop up, only one is displayed, then if you like that design, you’re charged again to save it (though nothing is apparently stopping you from screenshotting the design and manually making the svg), or if you want to get a new design with the same prompt you are once again charged. I’d rather see a slight increase to the default creation price, and then be offered several choices.
Since I already mentioned that a guy like me will have more coins then they need, and apparent access to the magic canvas that I am just now looking into, it’s not like I’ll ever need to care about the economy of the coins, but I do care about usability and convenience. What would be cool is having tiers of creation/bundled pricing. Initial creation is 20c, have the creator make files from the same prompt and charge 35c, have it create 3 and charge 45c. Sure it makes it so that users aren’t burning through their coins as quickly, but as there is no monetary value to the coins, you’re really just bottlenecking people’s creativity and time.
Again, the amount of coins that any user is getting is likely more than they need, and I can see that the coins are strictly for giving limited access to an admittedly great tool, but the economics are a bit strange, to me anyway.
As a side note, I’m excited to use it, truly. My initial crowdfunding investment has grown into so much more than I ever thought, and I’ve loved having these machines and this community in my life. I’ll post here when I can, I’ve got a few ideas, but my current craft room is an absolute mess…
I’ve checked spam and tried on a couple of different days but still no emails, on a regular gmail account. I rather like the results, although yes, like all AI it seems to be utterly bewildered by text sometimes…