Free plan vs Pro plan
1 month FREE trial with full set of features and 250 free Detective Hours
During your Pro Plan trial period, we want you to get to know The Detective, and fully explore all that she is capable of, so we give you 250 Detective Hoursℹ️ in addition to unlimited access to all Pro features.
At the end of the 1st month, we’re sure you’ll feel the comfort that 3D Printing with Peace of Mind brings, and we hope you’ll continue choosing The Detective as your partner in printing.
If you want to continue receiving The Detective's full attention, you can upgrade to the Pro plan for little more than a Starbucks per month. Or you can decide to let the relationship cool down a bit. In this case, you don't have to do anything and your account will be automatically converted to the Free plan.
How is the Pro plan different from the Free plan?
With the Pro plan you can enjoy 25 frames-per-second premium webcam streaming. This premium webcam streaming is always on, so you can watch your printer remotely even if it's not printing. With the Free plan the webcam streaming will be only 1 frame per 10 seconds. And it only streams while you are printing.
There are also a few features that are available only to Pro plan subscribers. They are:
- G-Code remote upload and printing.
- Receiving alerts via text (SMS).
- Unlimited OctoPrint Tunneling.
- Webcam feed sharing.
- Slack integration.
The Pro plan comes with 50 Detective Hours each month. The Free plan comes with only 10 Detective Hours each month.
The Subscribe&Save Detective Hour Pack are only available as addon to the Pro plan. The Subscribe&Save Detective Hour Packs allow you to buy Detective Hours at a rate much lower than the ones available to the Free plan users.
The Pro plan subscribers get to enjoy concierge technical support (simply because we are a small team and we don't have resources to support everyone on individual basis).
How much will the Pro plan costs me?
The Pro plan costs $4 per month if you subscribe to the annual plan. This is barely 1 coffee each month. If you go with the monthly plan, it'll cost $6 per month.
The base plan is limited to 1 printer. If you have more printers, you can add them at $2 per month per additional printer.
You can get more details on TSD pricing page.
What can't The Detective just work for free? People love FREE, you know.
Everyone at TSD loves free too! And we also love 3D printing and we want to make TSD as accessible as possible to 3D printing enthusiasts like us. That's why we offer the Free plan to give everyone any option to remotely monitor their 3D printers. Feel free (pun intended) to stay on the Free plan for as long as you want if a monthly subscription is not your cup of tea (or plate of spaghetti in our case).
However, we do have some limits on the Free plan. For instance, it doesn't have the sleek 25 frames-per-second webcam streaming. And it is limited to 10 Detective Hours (what is it?). The reason is that these cool features do cost non-trivial amount on things like GPU (the expensive computational resources that power the AI behind TSD), cloud storage, and network bandwidth. If The Detective just offers unlimited free service to everyone, she and her team can't sustain themselves.
Can I just pay a one time fee for the service, just like Simplify3D?
Unfortunately the answer is "No" for 2 reasons:
TSD is different from Simplify3D in that it incurs server cost in the cloud (unless you run your own TSD server). And this cost is re-curring. For every minute TSD server runs in the cloud, we need to pay for computation power, storage and bandwidth. If we charge users a flat fee, at some point the money will run out and we won't be able to pay the bills that our infrastructure provider sends us. It does nobody any good if The Detective has to surrender herself to the bankruptcy court.
We believe in continuous improvement and accountability. Subscription gives all users the power to hold us accountable, since anyone can cancel their subscription at any time. You probably have heard of examples of early Simplify3D advocates who paid for the software growing unhappier for the lack of improvements. There aren't a lot of resorts when you have shelled out $150 upfront when the software or service gets worse.