Looks promising. My experience with technology Kickstarters has been that the market price ultimately stabilizes at about (or below) the Kickstarter price, and that actual product quality is a crapshoot. So, I’m content to wait for a finished product with independent reviews.
The market environment often changes significantly before the product ships, too. A KS I backed for an inexpensive early FDM printer never shipped, but also, by the original shipping date, there were other similarly-priced options on the market. An expensive early drone project I backed also never shipped, and there were better drones on the market by the time they gave up.
YMMV, of course.
Link without tracking, for anyone else interested:
Yes. you have had a lot worse luck with crowd funding than myself. I’ve had one item not ship and one become useless due to lack of software support out of dozens of things backed. Most of which I got at very good prices. Over all I’d say I’m up.
I definitely did not mean to rain on a parade there.
It would be interesting to see statistics with proper sampling about some of that kind of stuff. At one point, I thought about doing an “adventures in crowdfunding” blog post/article. I definitely backed some stinkers in the early days of Kickstarter.
Kickstarter is better than some of the other platforms because they require actual prototypes to be made before you can even put a product up there, as I understand things.
Tindie and indiegogo are less reliable from what I’ve seen.
The only Kickstarter they ever completely failed me was a book project. In the end they just punted and released a PDF, they couldn’t manage the printing process. It remains to be seen if I get my lightup RPG dice from pixel. They’re way behind schedule.
I been reluctant to fund any projects in awhile. Trying to get caught up financially.
But this one seemed reasonable after seeing my dinner bill for four while on vacation.
That is tempting. The build plate is a little smaller than I’d like though, but it would make 80% of what I’ve been printing lately, just with more runs to make quantities needed.
The filament feed and storage doesn’t thrill me, but I’m still tempted.
Larger is always better but considering the Prusa Xl with 5 heads and an enclosure is close to $5K this is very tempting for getting into multi material printing. Also, my use cases are such that it would cover 95% of my stuff at this build volume.
Presumably a newer requirement, or they don’t check very carefully. The drone thing I backed looked like they had working prototypes, but it turned out to be CGI.
I would have less concern these days over something from an established brand since they have a reputation to lose. Still a little funky seeing established brands using Kickstarter for pre-sales.
Edit: I guess the drone thing specifically was Indiegogo rather than Kickstarter. There were some others that were definitely Kickstarters that never produced working hardware, though they may have had prototypes of some sort.
So what happens if you back something and it doesn’t ship? Do you just lose out or do they refund your money? I’ve never been involved in a kickstarter, so have no idea. Is it just a gamble you take on whether it comes to fruition or not?
Normally you get a refund. Depends a bit on the project.
It does make some sense, though. They can bring a product to market a lot more quickly if they have outside funding. That used to be only the realm of investment firms, but we’re well past that.
To me, the more funky scenario is people using gofundme to do personal fundraising for health or personal finance related issues. Something’s gotta give there, the US healthcare financial system is a trainwreck.
I agree about the healthcare stuff. I had a friend who passed away last year from cancer, and she had to do a gofundme to help with her expenses. I find it so frustrating that the government will forgive student debt (people choose to go to college) and not provide free healthcare for people suffering medical issues they have no control over. I would be willing to pay higher taxes if there was free healthcare for everyone. And I don’t think there should be taxes on food, at least not on fresh food like fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and foods like bread, soup, etc. Processed foods like candy and junk food, yes, go ahead and tax those, they are a luxury. But healthy food, no. People need food to survive.
there’s no guarantee of that, tho. i’ve lost all the $$ on a kickstarter project (lampster) before. you have to be prepared to get nothing, although i’ve only had one go completely south on me out of the 10 i’ve backed. and the most $$ i’ve ponied up has been the xtool screen printing kit ($429).
I use my Aerogarden all the time to grow lettuce and herbs year round. Huh on googling, looks like Aerogarden is shutting down. Too bad, but there are a ton of competitors out there.
OK that’s a ride. Aerogarden announced their closing last year, and then this spring announced that they’re back. Great for indoor growing of small plants, highly recommended.
Well…that’s how state taxes in nj work…unless it is a prepped food(so really taxed on the service of making your food for you) it isn’t taxed. Including some made food items like bread(which is usually not a food item by itself, it’s usually used in making a larger food item, like a sandwich, which would be taxed).
And yeah, lots of kickstarters over the years have just delivered nothing and kept all the money, or just went bankrupt trying to deliver, or were terrible with money and kept trying to shell game several projects at once to stay afloat, or the one guy who completed publishing his book and then burned a book for every time someone asked when he was gonna deliver.
I just have my own idiosyncratic sampling of projects for reference. I’m not sure how typical this is of Kickstarter as a whole.
Of the seven Kickstarters I backed that failed to deliver, there was one that provided a refund. Some of those are allegedly still planning to deliver. One of those is now at 14 years past due with no updates for over a decade. The most recent failure was from 2018 and they were pretty obnoxious about it.
By contrast, I have had 87 that did deliver (at least eventually – and a fair number of those were contributing to community projects where there was no individual deliverable).
