Well you just purchased a $5000.00 laser (for a basic no frills one) that will only work while connected to the internet, is very finicky about ambient temperature so it only works when it is happy, and has a plethora of issues including not being able to open the lid all the way because it will damage a cable that will render your machine useless has now announced that going forward only the basic functions will be free! Oh, I forgot to add that you can only contact tech support via email or forum posts which the average response time is a few days.
Wow:
Precision position
The next new free Glowforge Print feature is Precision Position. With the new toolbar, you can now move and resize your artwork precisely. When you select an object, the new Precision Position tool appears. With it, you can:
- Change the X and Y positions to precisely move it
- Set its W (width) or H (height) dimension to resize it
- Use the tic-tac-toe box to control whether the changes are relative to the center, edge or corner of the selection
- By default, your selection scales proportionately. Click the link icon to make it stretch instead.
- Hold down the shift key when resizing to reverse the lock icon behavior.
- Try entering 6mm + 0.008in, or 2*0.125in for some extra math fun!
And you can create text too - all of this included with the “premium” paid upgrade service. Gosh, I’m so saddened now that I cancelled my Glowforge and decided to write LightBurn instead.
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The world is richer with benefits as a result.
I am THANKFUL you created Lightburn for all of us.
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I get so frustrated when I see people recommend Glowforge to people asking for advice on which CO2 laser to purchase on Facebook. How can anybody think it is a good idea to buy a GlowForge at this point.
Ever heard of the Mr. Beam 2?
I regret ever purchasing that machine.
Did you really buy one of those? I was actually on the list to purchase a GlowForge when they first announced, but after about the third delay I saw it was headed toward doom and despair and started looking at other options. For once I dodged a bullet.
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Yeah I did… because of the delay with Glowforge… and because it was European based… eating dust at the moment.
I’m sold. How could I possibly resist being my own earring? If it can do that for me it must be worth the money.
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I saw that and my first thought was, hmm… That wouldn’t actually be that hard…
Unless a person does their due diligence by exploring their options, they will never see how bad a Glowforge is as a laser and a company.
I guess you’ll be doling out the refunds now?
Yeahhh…but Glowforge has a camera…
oh wait…nevermind 
And on top of that they don’t yet “know” what pricing will be and the initial feature set still isn’t finished. Out of the goodness of their heart, however, they are graciously making it available free right now as an open beta.
Perhaps that actually means that they are using their customers to find all of the bugs in whatever they have right now and that they are hoping to get owners addicted to the “new” features so that they will pay whatever GF asks when the time comes to announce pricing.
Amazing that Lightburn can add so many more features for a variety of laser platforms with only 2 or 3 people when it takes GF with 80+ employees so long to add a small number of new features. On top of that LB support is at most a day away.
@LightBurn - can you divulge how many customers you have right now? It would be interesting to compare that to the GF user base, which is claimed to be 20k+, at least by some owners.
LightBurn has a little over 20,000 deployed licenses, and some of those have gone to schools where a single license might be used by 50 to 100 students. There are also likely people who have stopped using it, but I suspect our user count is around 23,000. It’s tough to get true numbers.
Until recently, LightBurn was a single developer (me - Jason) with two support helpers (Rick and Ray), and now we’ve added another full time dev (Adam).
I’d be pretty curious to learn how Glowforge’s staff is distributed. A lot of what happens in LightBurn would be much easier if we had a fixed hardware target - like a 40w laser of known size. The fact that it supports a variety of controllers with quite different abilities is a huge part of the complexity.
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Congratulations on the success, though I suppose the number of headaches goes up with sales. It’s even more impressive with just 3 or 4 of you and the number of completely different laser controllers that you support…
Glowforge lays out its employees by name and function in the “About Us” page on their website. Of their current listing of 84 employees, it looks like 26 are in some form of management including founders, managers, VPs, and directors. That’s 30 % of the staff so it starts to make sense why it takes so long for them to develop new features. Perhaps they are being manged much more for selling off the company than for making a good product and actively improving it. At least one of their early, presumably principle, employees has left (Aeva). I’d love to hear her story.
They must have a very powerful PR firm because you cannot find any negative press about GF unless you look at all the complaints in their forum which they use for customer service.
One can always count on Amazon who did an awesome job of cleaning up their bogus reviews
https://www.amazon.com/Glowforge-3D-Laser-Printer/product-reviews/B015SGCUBM
but…wait there is more
https://www.bbb.org/us/wa/seattle/profile/3d-printers/glowforge-1296-90007778/customer-reviews
That’s GOOGLE PAY TO PLAY Program which lists GLOWFORGE in the first pages oh Google Search as a result of Ad Words and YouTube advertising.
You got to dig deeper if you want the good stuff…
Cheers
Sasquatch
Very deep indeed! The Amazon reviews are far and few between and most people would never read a BBB review. Only 11 reviews in 5 years is not dramatic but most are from the last year. I have never seen a bad review from a reviewer.
Most people buy direct from Glowforge. When a company pays a PR services company as you’ve mentioned like Reputation defender
https://www.reputationdefender.com/
Or similar they can burry bad reviews to many many pages in the back of the search results.
Your comment is correct about their PR firm… nevertheless I was able to locate two separate sources of negative reviews…
Most of us on this forum already acknowledge that a Glowforge is a huge paperweight without access to the Internet . As one digs deeper and deeper
in the back pages of search results one can discover more and more skeletons about polices that Glowforge implements to hurt users to their benefit.
LightBurn is a product which I’m sure is not well liked by the Glowforge folks.
I could be mistaken but you almost seem to be cheering for Glowforge from the sidelines.
Cheers
Sasquatch