Cricut Wants Users to Pay for Unlimited Use of Cutting Machines They Already Own
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I go way back with various machines. Cutting, bending, printing, whatever.
If it won't take gcode, or some other open data to operate with, whatever it is, no matter how good it is, the answer is no.
Always no.
It has to take, gcode, svg, dxf, real postscript, hpgl, png, something. And it has to do that offline, period.
There are great machines made in the 80's still making money, and I saw one just yesterday. Wonderful to see.
Yes, I realize these are consumer grade machines, but what will also happen is these things will get abandoned.
Maybe someone will reverse engineer them and they become useful over the longer term.
I hope someone does.
https://discord.gg/KsReJ3cN Come help!
The fuck you would be worth it! Good luck!
Glowforge Pro - $5,995
Glowforge Basic - $2,995
Beamo Desktop (30W) - $2,000
All-in-one laser cutter on your desk. Otherwise modifying a 3D printer (e.g. Ender 3/5) with CNC/Laser attachments work as well if your budget is much lower. :)
There is absolutely 0 reason why a CNC laser cutter needs commodity internet at all. And I'd argue that an internet controlled fire-causing laser is a Bad Idea.
Because Glowforge requires their server farms online, Glowforge could pull a Cricut at any moment's notice.
There is no evidence.
Anytime there is lock in on machines, there will eventually be rent seeking.
I have zero trust on this.
Nice to know.
I need to edit while I can.
In other words, a type of maker space / hackspace.
Nowadays, it looks like you can use MTC with "your" Cricut, but you have to pay Cricut for the privilege.
I say fuck 'em. This isn't new, and it's not going to stop if people keep buying the machines.
Their business model should be closer to 3d printers than to inkjet.
By going this route, they almost certainly make more money.
Hacker news users are not normal users.
Those ordinary people, who may not realize it even, depend on us to push back hard.
Nobody else will. Few are qualified even.
It is strange to be living in a time where law, government is so damn unaware and apparently, uncaring about these things.
The nice thing about tech is that it's possible for us to push back by hacking on stuff and opening it up rather than resorting to legislative tools, and this can have the same effect of forcing those manufacturers hand but without the artificiality of law.
Tons of us won't like it. And when we don't, we can also point to why we just can't have nice things.
Many of us really smart geeks thinks Stallman is the way. If we can't see the source code of every single thing we have, we don't have it. Free or die!
Many others of us think that it's more important privacy is respected. Smooth user experiences are more important than perfect freedom of code. So Apple is the way. You may not know the code on your device, but at least it isn't being sold to the world.
And still others think the Google/Facebook way is right. They provide great services to users! Yes they make money selling private data, but their free tools are invaluable to our life.
With such a divided view among the "tech elite", how could we really stop anything?
Agree that federal law is really the only hope for this kind of stuff, but that is rather hard to do for many reasons.
This is not about "the one, right way" at all.
It is all about what makes good sense for humans and that it continues over a longer period of time.
And many of these things are not exclusive.
Smooth does not have to mean closed.
Free with ADS does not have to also mean no privacy.
Etc...
Open, in the Stallman sense, is not always important. Open data vs open code, and machines, who owns, what is actually a rental, etc... can be resolved to something more livable without being draconian, or useless.
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
Whether you believe that should be our economic system is another matter altogether.
And it is not "the" right model, just a possible and I would argue short sighted one.
What they did was model up a rental business and seeded it as if it were an ownership type one.
That is predatory, depending on what experience level people are buying. They run a very real risk of not understanding what they are buying.
And that, along with better ways to value externalities, would render that model higher cost and risk, as it should be.
Anyone with sufficient experience sees those costs, risks and also sees them as external to the enterprise, and that it all comes at their own expense.
That expense renders the value proposition far less compelling.
Exactly why this bait and switch happened too.
Just because it is legal, does not make it right or ethical.
Given the rise in these trends, yeah. Time to revisit what is legal.
Until enough people are willing to adopt a different value system, we're stuck with this.
For example, Cricut probably has a very strong interest in not opening up their devices, because, while they're the most popular consumer device in this space right now, they don't have much of a natural moat. Keeping things closed makes it harder for current users to switch, which, in turn makes it harder for a competitor to compete. Even if they have a technically superior product. This artificial moat is probably much more valuable to them than the lost profits from being less attractive to people who are into both scrapbooking and Hacker News.
It's hard to compete against this. If you try to sell hardware at an honest cost, you'll likely be the more expensive option (or you can price-match but you'll have to reduce your quality) and the vast majority of consumer decision making is driven by the immediate price tag.
It's even worse if you're in the venture-funded world. Money is cheap and you're rewarded in the short run by how many "customers" you have, not whether they can be turned into customers whe pay you more than it costs to acquire them.
Reducing citizen's power to mere consumes, limited only to buy or not buy, is exactly what allows corporations to get away with these practices. It starts with one, and soon they all collude and you have no choice but to suffer their abuse or go without an entire category of products (spying smart TVs displacing dumb TVs, telecoms selling traffic data, etc.).
It's not going to stop until they're forced to stop, with legislation.
A laser cutter isn't a life saving device.
When you ignore all the objectionable parts, it sure makes consumer protection look unreasonable, doesn't it?
Besides, the ultimate price consumers pay isn't any lower - it's just hidden, delayed, and probably higher.
Let me ask you - why shouldn't citizens be allowed to collectively bargain, expressing their terms in the form of legislation? If companies don't like the terms, they're free to sell their products elsewhere.
Printer ink still comes with DRM, as do tractors, and smart TVs still spy on us. If it were as simple as collectively not purchasing these products (without using legislation as a means of organizing this not-purchasing), these issues would have been resolved already, instead of getting worse.
Not that I disagree especially with the examples you have provided. Maybe I'm not talking about an 'organized' boycott in that sense. I'm more talking about individual purchasing decisions. It seems somewhat Kafkaesque that I can call my congressperson to request legislation to stop a business practice relating to a product that is voluntary, non-essential and crucially, that I am still willingly purchasing!
It’s not surprising though. The machine is probably sold at breakeven like printers [0]. It’s a shame. The machine is decently built and can do a lot more.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/why-all-printers-suc...
Selling hardware to do a thing well is so passe. So we force hardware to the cloud where we can then exert a toll booth for usage.
Hardware is nice, but their software decisions completely ruined it. Have a quest 1, will never buy oculus again.
I guess I'll just turn off autoupdates once I get it working again so they don't break it a third time.
https://www.androidcentral.com/how-find-and-download-app-lab...
My wife has one, absolutely loves it. Never ending supply of trinkets and gifts for people. Keeps her busy.
Not cheap, but a lot cheaper then random shopping trips.
So she’s happy, and my wallet is mostly happy.
She’s not remotely technical. That she can operate it means they did something right.
This is line is just infuriating to me; phrasing this change as a "we were giving you something for free before, but you should be paying for it".
Of course it was "free"; the thing had already been paid for. This is about as ridiculous as Samsung charging me a subscription fee for unlimited watch-time on my TV, which previously was free, or Apple requiring a subscription for the unlimited use of my Macbook.
Wrapping perfectly-functional-locally devices with a "cloud service" in order to maintain control needs to be reigned in. The cricut argument here of "[the cloud is needed to] optimize the design and the cutting instructions" is a problem of their own making.
Just a little food for thought:
Say their servers did a lot of processing to ensure that your designs were cut optimally or were successful along with the time or some other criteria. That's an actual real value-add, and people may be willing to pay for it.
How do we know whether it's a value-add or not?
Open data is how we know. Free tools and do those job perfectly well. We've got a ton of them. None of this is new.
Yeah, this is why it "prior to now had been free". They were basically packaging unlimited uploads into the hardware (which is almost universally a stupid idea). They did bring this on themselves.
I'm curious why the opted for cloud optimization. Is it too hardware intensive for their target audience? My CAD software doesn't struggle too hard unless there are a ton of polygons, but my desktop is probably specced more than the average consumer.
> Of course it was "free"; the thing had already been paid for. This is about as ridiculous as Samsung charging me a subscription fee for unlimited watch-time on my TV, which previously was free, or Apple requiring a subscription for the unlimited use of my Macbook.
Here's the thing, though. It costs Samsung nothing for you to watch TV (they actually might make money if you watch more ads). Likewise, it costs Apple nothing for you to use your Mac. Updates cost them money, but that's a fixed cost. The amount you use the Mac doesn't make it cost more. Cricut is actually paying for these, so it does cost them money. Not saying what they did was right, but these things aren't the same.
One potentially reasonable answer is that their optimizations are a significant part of their value add, and they weren't comfortable letting people run that software themselves. If that's the case, this doesn't bother me as long as they add the ability for it to use an open format.
We need some kind of a consumer protection law that triggers a return window any time the functionality of a device that you have already purchased substantially changes (for a reasonable period of time after purchase). People who bought a Cricut should be able to return them now, and Cricut should have to eat that cost. If it's no longer viable to provide that cloud service for free, give people a version they can run on their desktop or add the ability to print open formats, or accept that a substantial number of customers are going to demand refunds that Cricut will have to process.
Well, there is one reason: the cloud is more powerful. A computationally heavy task can run locally, but if uploading to the cloud and sending the results back is 10x faster, most users would probably prefer that. However, the best way to solve that (IMO) is to by default do local computation and have a subscription for cloud access.
A full page PDF of text with a few thousand letters specified as TTF outlines prints in realtime on pretty much everything while being rasterized into far more data than the cutting instructions for a plotter with a knife, and Adobe isn't grabbing at wallets for the privilege of doing so.
In ye old days that was the case, then the explore line came out (with them advertising that you could bring your own SVGs), and it worked okay for a while... But now we're back to locked down.
These cutters live in a weird market segment of people that want to work with a complicated device, but who don't want working with it to be complicated. It's, in some ways, an inverse of 3D printing, which has a lot of people who revel in the complexity of the device. I love my 3D printers, and putting them together from scratch so I kind of know how it functions. I can't imagine my girlfriend buying something like a Cricut that she has to assemble herself.
> If you think you're going to use a Cricut to make things you can sell on Etsy or the like, you will be sorely disappointed.
Do people really do that? I always presumed that Cricut's were for one offs or prototypes, and that by the time you had an Etsy store, you would just order printed and cut stickers from China. I may well be wrong, I just figured there would be huge cost savings for doing so because of the factory's economy of scale.
In short, the product was sold with the promise of unlimited free uploads. Dutch customers can go to the seller they bought the machine from (not Cricut) and demand to have this functionality restored or get a full refund (the plotter has to returned to the seller) if it cannot be restored by the seller. How this is then resolved between the seller and Cricut is not the customers problem, they have a 'contract' with the seller, not Cricut.
I have already bought it...shopped, signed a contract, paid for it, agreed with a bank in some cases on financing it...before I encoutner or have access the the licensing agreement.
If I disagree with licensing can I juts take it back? Am I just precluded from using my smart driving features?
I bought it, you don't get to establish rules after the fact...
I’m not sure if it was official policy (out of fear that clickwrap isn’t enforceable if you can’t opt out) or if it was just worth it to pay off people who went to that much effort, but either way good for them.
So technically, this isn't a limit on the hardware, but on the software, even if realistically it's the same thing if you print a lot of uploaded designs since you can't use the machine without using their cloud software.
So legally they are probably in the clear to put limits on the "free" software, even if morally it's the equivalent of a hardware restriction.
I agree Cricut must have had their legal team vet this decision, but that does not mean they necessarily believe they'd have a watertight defence if taken to court over it. It just indicates they made a business calculation and decided it's a good risk/reward ratio. Not many disputes make it to court. For example (pure speculation): maybe their lawyers estimated a 90% chance that they make lots of money out of this scam, just giving a few refunds and apologies to the angriest customers; a 9% chance that a serious lawsuit emerges (in which case they can probably just backtrack on the whole thing at some small cost); and a 1% chance that they somehow end up in serious hot water with a regulator.
People who buy a machine, ultimately buy the work product of said machine.
How that happens is a layer above the core value proposition.
Technically, it is a limit on what they want / need to do, which is why they bought the machine.
Nits being picked higher up are not germane.
Isn't that a key distinction? Users can create unlimited designs of their own and print (or whatever it's called) them as many times as they want. The restriction is on importing external files, but once those are imported, there's no restriction on printing them.
So users have unlimited use of their machines which they paid for and own, but metered use of pattern imports using the cloud software that they license but do not own.
I think it's slimy business move and even unethical to charge for what was once free, but I'd be surprised if it's found to be illegal.
Secondly, the data involved in the entire process being open means we don't have to talk about these silly things. And that is what an unlimited looks like.
Actual open machines that take open data, are limited. Ones that are not open, that do not take open data are in fact quite Limited.
And I didn't say anything about legal. It probably is, and I'm sure they're team vetted it too.
I am all for revisiting what is legal and what is not, and or how we value things so Market forces determine that in a better way too. I don't care how it goes.
I care very much about machines being limited by software.
And be really clear, if there is preferred software for use with the machine, and it adds some real value of some kind, that's all fine and good. The perfectly Fair way to compete, and people will benefit from that value.
That isn't what's going on here.
The fact that the operation data stream isn't open, creates artificial value, but they're trading on. That'll ultimately comes at the expense of anyone who bought into this.
The real standard should be a decade from now someone finds one of these in a dumpster fixes it up and can drive it with whatever tools they feel like to make the data that they need.
Meta: I use voice input on this one sorry for the random capitalization typos.
I'm not a Cricut user, but Cricut said:
“Any project created within Design Space with images or fonts found in Design Space can be modified and do not count as a personal image upload. If users want to use images from other applications, such as a .jpg or .png, and upload those images to Design Space, that counts as a personal image upload.”
And I didn't say anything about legal. It probably is, and I'm sure they're team vetted it too.
Then I think we're arguing the same point -- what Cricut did is bad, but probably legal and well within their rights and it is what happens when people embrace closed platforms without understanding the drawbacks.
It's the same thing that leads people to buy $80 inkjet printers that only work with DRM'ed inkjet cartridges that cost $60 for a set of cartridges that contain $3 worth of ink.
Ask anyone in design about how good those kinds of solutions are. There's a lot better software out there for doing design work. That makes all of what you put here a very severe limitation on how useful the machine actually is.
My favorite printer of all time with a PostScript printer my tektronix, made later by Xerox. You could literally FTP a PostScript file to it. And it without put a page. Loved it.
Printers pissed me off so much I don't currently own one. And I have a need coming up so I'm shopping around for some open basic printer that I can get used, or even pay a little more for new, that doesn't hassle me in these ways, and that can be driven with relatively open data.
Otherwise, it's cheaper just by few pages down then, or print where there printers available and deal. Which is exactly what I've done.
> A Letter to the Cricut Community, From Ashish Arora CEO
> We will continue to allow an unlimited number of personal image and pattern uploads for members with a Cricut account registered and activated with a cutting machine before December 31, 2021. This benefit will continue for the lifetime of your use of these machines.
http://jimlund.org/build-to-spec/Setting%20Up%20Libcutter%20...
Cricut's USB exposes itself as a serial USB port, and it looks like the library is there to make SVGs cut for it.
EDIT: It looks like there is some sort of encryption between the host and Cricut as well? So Cricut makes it intentionally unfriendly to make it work with thir party vendors.
Extremely scummy stuff.
now we need the legal team and the class action, good thing for me im not a lawyer.
Big no there. Or big "caveat emptor".
If I do not see one of those, the machine is a hard pass. Everytime.
https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette
Silhouette's proprietary software comes with a "store" like Cricut for buying designs, but it's a resource hog and you have to pay for an SVG cutting feature. Inkscape is a little hassle to setup but once you get it working it's great.
I think we are experiencing a similar problem in the world of new enterprises. Software companies can produce huge growth/profit/market valuations/etc. To attract the capital required to create the company, they have to promise and do everything in their power to achieve the same money-printing results as software ones. But they are not inherently high-potential as software companies, so the price and quality of their products suffer.
Everyone wants to be a tech company because that's the way to survive and thrive in the current capital climate. Banks, airlines, real estate leasing companies, hotels, etc. mimic tech companies, because otherwise, capital looks elsewhere and the company won't get funded.
There have been plenty of other companies who were not able to make the business model work, folded, and left their users stranded with hardware that is no longer supported and doesn't work. That's a worse outcome. (Juicero, Picobrew)
I'm not justifying hardware that depends on services like this - I wouldn't design it that way, and I wouldn't buy something like this. But here we are...
I will never buy Cricut again
Nope.
That's what voting with your dollars is for, as in: don't buy the effing thing.
I don't use it heavily, but it works :)
Post-Internet: capitalism has to turn evil to survive