Prusa goes Subscription  

RE: Prusa goes Subscription

Microsoft gives you 1 TB of storage as part of their 365 package, for the same annual price as Prusa's 20 GB plan. (Or 6 TB in the "family" package, for 30% more money.) No camera feed in that one, but AI and an office suite instead.

Yes, I know, economy of scale etc. And Microsoft's calculation will assume that on average, subscribers will only make use of a fraction of that capacity, while Prusa Connect subscribers may actually use a bigger chunk of the capacity they book. Still, looking at just the operating cost, Prusa's subscription tiers seem expensive.

RE: Prusa goes Subscription

This does not apply to websites so much. There is no material cost, your hosting cost is the same as you need regional data centre, and you can use AI systems to handle your first line support (whether you want to or not, is a separate matter). 

Posted by: @cwbullet

It is harder to make a profit in the Czech Republic than in China because labor and material costs are higher. 

RE:

Your estimate seems to be missing some things

1) Employee costs addition to salary: Office space cost, software license costs, employee benefits costs, recruitment costs etc?

2) Global support staff for all those annoying, inconvenient timezones?

3) Security team? (counter-hacking)

4) Trust/safety/moderation? Put up a file store, "nefarious" people will share who-knows-what.

5) devops, sysops? (Your cloud provider will only run their own hardware)

6) A manager on a manager's salary for this new product

Cloud and existing business units will help with some of this, but existing units still more resources to take on the extra work.

I don't think adding 5 people is enough for "prusa grade reliability and support". Also, how many non-engineers are there in support role for every engineer?

Posted by: @onno

Let's do some maths, shall we?

If 50k users take the 20GB plan, the cost breakdown is about as follows, based on cost at Hertzner  on a monthly basis:

S3 bucket with 10TB storage and 30TB traffic: €114
5* AX162-R (48C96T/256GB) for slicing and other compute: €1435
5 FTE with an average workplace cost of 100k per annum: €41.666

cost per user per month: €0,86

RE:

I think the ball park estimate is in line with reality.

1. Workplace cost means all those are included. Salary, including any taxes is about 80%. €20k/annum is ample to provide the rest. Rembmer, we're not talking about silicon valley salaries here. €100k/annum for a FTE is a realistic for workplace cost for developers/ops ppl in the Czech Republic.

2. Part of Prusa support in general. Also, once people have it set up, the rest will not really be taxing on the support department. But if you want to bill the project, then please propose how to do the split.

3. Part of the DevOps team, perhaps with some consulting that then needs to be integrated into the cost picture. In the places I've worked at DevOps means developers are/were part of the same team. Developers and Ops are not separate.

4. I do clean up on printables from time to time. My experience tells me that Prusa has relatively low awareness in this regard. It seems to mostly depend on the community to do the monitoring and reporting.

5. Already covered by the DevOps mentioned.

6. Managers are overhead. I suspect that the manager would probably have a higher reporting span than 5, as this is quite low for an agile organisation. Perhaps add 1 FTE to cover such people in aggregate.

(11400+(6×100000÷12)+1435)/50000 = €1,26  (I corrected the error for the costs of storage I made earlier) And 50k users is a conservative estimate to divide the costs on. Given that the storage and compute is such a small part of the equation on a per user basis, the cost of personnel is only going to be lower as the number of users scales up.

RE: Prusa goes Subscription

On O, I would pay a little extra for those items especially taking in a count the quality of the support.  

RE: Prusa goes Subscription

Just my humble opinion, but it seems Prusa has lost focus on the product.  They’re reacting to competition by playing with marketing strategies rather than developing genuine innovation.  They’ve trimmed the engineering and development staffs when they should have doubled down with them.

RE: Prusa goes Subscription

Personallly even if i dont mind the turn to Subscription services i wouldn't join one. Gor a hobbyist its actually useless.Also Prusa's name lost a lot of its laster with the way they handle the XL and the fact that they are not offering anything better than the competition. But they charge more. I joined 3d printing as a hobby not as a job so having subscribed services doesn't make sense to me. The question now is for Prusa to decide in what kind of customer base does it want to cater mostly. If they try to win prosumers with cash to throw away or 3d printer farms, maybe is a good way to go. If it is for the hobbyist that has a couple of 3d printers and maybe has a bit of fomo and want to buy new things Prusa is drifting away. Actually it already did. The only thing that makes sense to buy from Prusa now, for the hobbyist, is the INDX which is not Prusas anyway and we dont know when it will be actually shipped. And in what other brands is going to be offered eventually. If this subscription is the new race that prusa will run and forget about polishing a bit the lan approach ( Prusalink ) then is just not the company for me. Actually the sure thing is that SLA wise is nonsensical to go with prusa.