Unfair question… I’d buy a Glowforge. 
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It’s a question of scale. How much industrial equipment can you store in your apartment?
(I had quite a bit in mine, but there wasn’t room to unpack any of it. Had to get a bigger place. And the difference exceeded that $1,500 a year)
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I’m sad for the maker community but I’ve never found the concept useful myself. I need access at 2 am.
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Did y’all see the announcement from Glowforge, Inventables and LittleBits? Some very generous offers for Techshop members who are left hanging.
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Yes and each one of these vendors has moved up a notch in my mind.
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For anyone who hasn’t seen it:
These are four companies I’ll be very happy to support in the future. 
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Yep, me too. Gonna have to go place an order or two. 
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Formlabs was able to join us at the last minute as well. I’m proud to be a part of such a supportive community.
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The letter you guys wrote almost made me tear up a little. Its really awesome of you guys.
It’s not very often that you buy a product and get to know the people making it, but I did with Glowforge and I feel lucky to have ended up here. You guys are great.
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Well done Dan. This is why I stuck around and believe in your company.
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My wife and I spent about that to join a local space. Learned 3d printing, basic Lasercuting, some cnc skills. And learned how much I disliked sharing shop space with a bunch of guys that saw us as low-class members that kept the power on. We bought a Ultimaker 2 printer and I was about to buy a Carvey when the GF was announced. IMHO, if I have to spend an hour cleaning before I can use a tool, it ought to be mine in the first place.
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It might have been mismanaged (or just unsustainable), but it doesnt seem like anything nefarious was going on. Apparently they were in the midst trying to change the company to a franchise model. But I can’t seem to find of they had money problems and were trying to solve them by franchising, or if they ran out of money because of a push to franchise. Probably the former? They released a little “history of the company” pamphlet that says they tried raising funds from members and investors, but couldn’t make it work.
I need to not share things. I actually like the idea of a maker space, but only the shared space part of it. I want to not share any tools or materials. Or snacks.
Also, I maybe dont want witnesses to how many times I burn myself with a hot glue gun before I learn my lesson.
But other than that, it sounds pretty fun.
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Yep. A lot of the ones styled after the “bring your work in and give it to Bob to run on the machine” spaces are like that. You may get help with issues or you may get a “too bad it didn’t work, let me know when you fix the file”. Lots of good things on the education side (classes etc) usually but that kind of moderated or gate keeper access would make me nuts.
Ours is a more collaborative approach - akin to what the spaces originally started out as. Every member is encouraged to be visible and if they’re interested (don’t need to be an expert) in an area to take a lead or work with the other folks who are in that same area (3D printing, lasers, woodworking, etc). Most all of our classes and specialty groups came out of a member who said “I’m interested in this and I’d like to make sure it’s successful here”.
Once someone is checked out on a machine, they get to use it on their own and on their own schedule. They don’t have to hand things off to anyone. And pretty much everyone shares the stuff they’re working on and are more than willing to help out anyone else who is doing similar stuff and has a question or an issue. I swear it’s as much a social club as a workshop
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Ours was much like yours where everyone was invited to take the lead in an area in which they were knowledgeable (or at least interested in). My wife and I dug in and figured out how a donated embroidery machine worked, then taught classes to others. All well and good.
The dark side was that the space also operated as small business incubator, and the entire setup was leveraged in their favor. If one of them needed the pick & place for a week, they got it – never mind it was only in use about 2 hours a day. No system to reserve time on printers, cutters, cnc, machine shop, wood shop, etc. – just show up (30 min drive for us) and hope one of the core group wasn’t camped out.
As “the largest maker space in a four-state area” they went after a lot of grant money (and got it). These were STEM ed grants for the most part, but somehow most of the $$$ went to the incubator guys. I told the Board how inappropriate this was, but since the Board was made up of the incubator guys… Well, you get the picture.
I’m not claiming that all 'spaces are like that, but that was my experience. I sincerely hope I’m the only maker in this group that has encountered anything like it.
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I don’t know of a lot of makerspaces that survive entirely on member fees. There’s a huge amount of volunteer work, grants, donations… (I think that one of tech shop’s problems may have been to try and put things on a purely business footing.)
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That was a huge bummer to hear, but I hope there will be more places and people willing to fill the space. You guys are awesome for circling the wagons and helping out with the discounts to the members.
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This is one area we have ready but haven’t implemented yet. We have an online system available for reservations (& a web cam view you can actually see what’s going on in the space to see if your machine is unreserved but someone is using it anyway ) Once we get to the point there’s contention for devices we’ll implement required reservations but it hasn’t been an issue for the past couple/three years.
We also don’t charge members separately for machine use. Some of the others I’ve seen have both a membership & an hourly machine charge. We just budget for consumables and machine maintenance as part of the operating expenses. If someone stops in when we’re open to the public (volunteers man the space) we allow non-members to use the facilities but then they pay for the time.
We do have reserved space available where a member can rent a portion of the space dedicated to them for a business startup but other than no one else can mess with their stuff, they don’t get any more priority than anyone else.
There’s a bigger one being built near ours that’s oriented more toward the business incubator model but they’re in a multi-year fundraising effort because they’re looking to follow more of the professionally staffed space model with the additional costs that entails. I think they’ve already raised about 1.5M and they’re still looking for more before they build out their operation. That’s a lot of money & an awful big operation.
We’re a 100 member 5,000 sq ft kind of place. Easy to keep it intimate.
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My local Techshop in Raleigh NC went out of business 4ish years ago, I was a member of that until it closed shop. Would the discount still apply?