Blog

Apr 22 2008, 04:34 PM

Vector Magic Unlimited is now available – it’s a new subscription plan featuring unlimited downloads, giving you full tracing freedom without having to pick and choose which results to download.

Sign up now to lock in a price of only $4.95 per month: http://vectormagic.com/unlimited

There are no signup or termination fees and you can cancel at any time. If you have already purchased tokens, no problem: any remaining tokens in your account are fully creditable towards a subscription.

At roughly the price of a meal at the local fast food restaurant, this plan is a great deal for anyone who would like to trace as few as 2 images or more per month.

We’re very excited to be offering this new worry-free plan and hope that you will find it a great option.

Best,

James and Jacob

P.S. The desktop application is still in the works. It’s just taking a bit longer than we had hoped, so we wanted to give you a better deal with the online service in the meantime.

Mar 04 2008, 03:45 PM

Thank you to everyone who has signed up!

Enough users have expressed frustration with the new pricing structure that we would like to address these concerns in this blog post.

What is a token worth?

Multiple surveys indicate that tracing an image by hand or with other tools takes on average about an hour, including clean-up.

The same surveys say that Vector Magic drops that time to about 15 minutes, also including clean-up.

This means that on average you save about 45 minutes of labor on each image.

Given the prevailing wage and overhead costs in the graphic design and print industries, these 45 minutes are worth about $20, of which we are asking for about $2.50 on average.

This price is aligned with our costs, and given projected volumes will allow us to continue operating and improving the service.

We understand the frustration of seeing a free service starting to charge, but these prices are simply essential to having the service continue to operate.

Can't you just have ads instead?

Experiments show that ads are not even close to sufficient to cover the costs, so some kind of fee is essential to the service being offered at all.

Subscriptions?

We are considering adding volume limited subscriptions (like cell phone plans), but there is no date set for that at the time of this writing.

We hope this helps clarify the issues. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.

Very Best,
James and Jacob

Feb 20 2008, 11:49 PM

To celebrate the transition away from Stanford and to reward all the early adopters, we are offering an additional two free tokens upon sign-up, above and beyond the two free tokens normally given (for a total of four).

For those of you interested in a desktop application version of Vector Magic, the first $50 of your token purchases are, for a limited time, creditable towards the purchase of a copy of the desktop application when it is released. Please see the full offer details.

Finally, we will be applying an across-the-board 25% discount on all token purchases until March 5th.

Thanks for all your interest and support during the research project. It has made the countless hours of development effort a pleasure.

Very Best,
James and Jacob

Feb 20 2008, 11:39 PM

We have added support for PDF, a widely used document format that also happens to be an excellent vector art format.

Most computers have a PDF viewer installed, but the latest version can always be downloaded at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Please let us know if you have any trouble with the PDF files we generate. We've tested them on the latest Acrobat reader, but backwards compatibility is always a tricky business.

Best,
James

Feb 20 2008, 11:38 PM

Vector Magic has officially moved away from Stanford and is operating independently at http://vectormagic.com

Online Service

Just as before, you may upload, vectorize, and view results using the interactive web application, all free of charge. We also allow you to download a free bitmap version of the vectorized result.

If you wish to download a vector version of the result, however, you must enable the download by exchanging a token for it. Once enabled, you can download that result in all the available file formats and re-vectorize it as many times as you'd like.

In order to give new users a chance to try out the site, and to check whether the output is compatible with their software, we give each user two free tokens upon sign-up. To encourage you to sign up now, we are doubling the number of free tokens to four until March 5th.

Tokens may be purchased via our secure servers for the published prices. Substantial discounts are given to users buying in bulk. We are also giving a 25% discount on all token purchases until March 5th.

We understand the frustration of seeing a service that used to be free starting to charge.
Please keep in mind, however, that servers, processing capacity, storage, bandwidth, and programmers all cost money. In order to continue operating the service, we must earn money in some way. We did some experiments with ads and found that they can only cover a small fraction of our operating expenses, which is why we are going with the current approach.

Desktop Application

We are working hard to release a desktop application. For a limited time, the first $50 spent on the website will be creditable towards a copy. Read the full details on http://vectormagic.com/info/desktop_application

General

We have added several sections to the website, including some new resource pages on the uses of vector images, and on the tools that can be used to view and edit them. We've made it very easy for you to make suggestions on these pages, so please help us improve the content by clicking the "Edit" links that appear next to each section on those pages.

Thanks for all of your interest and support these last several months.

Very Best, James and Jacob