Support? hello anyone there? ;-)

Upverter Support
#1

I’m a little bit at my wits end here but I’m wondering what is going on at Upverter that it takes so long to communicate with customers? Multiple people have indicated that a bug tracker should be implemented. Why is it so difficult to listen to customers?

Clearly Concierge is taking a toll on the staff (not to mention customers being disappointed with the speed and quality) and little else seems to be getting addressed on the platform. Seems like another pie in the sky / overpromise by a company to get more customers and then not being able to deliver. OK fine that’s not especially newsworthy and frankly is par for the course these days but what is Upverter going to do to resolve some of the issues being raised.

I think I personally come across 2 legitimate bugs per day. I’m not going to keep emailing them to support when I don’t hear back even if you keep telling me to email support - I have better things to do with my time. How many apps/startups/companies exist today that specifically deal with providing a drop-in support infrastructure for startups? Good God. Frankly I feel like I work in QA for Upverter but without the pay.

After using this platform for about 5 months and roughly 1000 hours I’m having a hard time seeing the value over something like Eagle for small projects and I’m seriously second-guessing my decision to use this platform for the more complex project I’m working on due to serious performance issues. Renaming a resistor should not take 30 seconds. A failed constraint should not lock up my workspace for 5 minutes while the DRC works its way through the ruleset. Christ - take note of the constraint failure and then bail out - don’t keep churning. I don’t need this fixed tomorrow but it would be nice to know if this is how it’s always going to be so I can stop wasting my time and go buy some other software.

Where is Upverter trying to position itself? An Eagle replacement or a more advanced and robust EDA? I sure saved a lot of money by not paying for Altium but I waste a lot of time staring at my screen waiting for things to work and it’s all going to be for not if Upverter fails which half the time I think is happening due to the lack of communication with their customers. I think this is the only time I’ve been asking for more communication not less from a company.

Can Upverter send out a mailer once a month (opt-in obviously) to keep customers up to date on the challenges that the company is working its way through? Too much to ask? Are you guys hiring? Do you need help? Not enough cash to hire? Maybe migrate the Concierge service to a community run platform where users can make $ building parts so that Upverter can focus on the EDA platform which doesn’t stagnate.

K my rant is over.

1 Like
#2

I have a feeling they can’t afford having someone checking forum and answering posts on daily basis. It seems these days only @cyu_qu goes through the forum topics once a week.

I’d be glad to donate money to solve particular bugs but for that we’d need a public bugtracker and some way of assigning a donation to a particular bug or a feature request.

#3

Agree. This is not yet a suitable tool for anything much in excess of 2-layer breakout-type boards IMO. I find and report at least one bug every board I’ve done on the platform and while they at least seem friendly and responsive, I too feel like a beta tester.

That said, I like the idea of hosted EDA and being able to access of designs from any computer so that is an immediate value-add. Also it would be killer if they released a mobile app to allow viewing or some amount of editing from an iPhone or iPad.

So I’ll echo your implied hope that they keep improving the core PCB tool. I’m open to paying some money for the tool but to me the concierge and its recent lackluster performance doesn’t itself justify $100/ mo so count me in the camp of waiting for a mid-tier package of $20-50/ mo and I’d sign up. And just make the concierge community-based or integrate with octopart or parts.io and not try to reinvent those services.

#4

There is a huge amount of potential here in this tool I’ll admit. I have to say I was a little disappointed when I realized that for the most part the tool is just an EDA app inside a browser. This is in contrast to what I think is a much more powerful concept of a hosted app that you interface with inside a browser.

For example, the DRC as far as I can tell is js running inside the browser which severely limits the scalability of this version of Upverter. What I would have liked to see is an api-based, fully decoupled, hosted DRC. That way I can keep churning away on my design and not be interrupted waiting for the app to become responsive. Let me continue working and iterating and then politely update me in a notification area of DRC violations but at least don’t keep me from getting work done. Even small projects you can feel this happening to some extent. And with a distributed DRC (or at least not a js 1-core limited version) running on a bunch of AWS EC2 instances is a way more powerful concept than what even traditional EDAs from Altium and Orcad, etc can offer. This is what Internet applications are supposed to be about - not just the same paradigm but wrapped inside a browser.

Sure there are things that need to happen in the browser like real-time canvas updates as I’m moving stuff around, calculating serpentines, displaying clearances, calculating and painting guides, etc but by and large that stuff seems to be OK and not too taxing.

I guess what I’m saying is that there is huge potential here and they’re not too far away from achieving it (I hope). :smile:

As for the Concierge I think they have an opportunity there as well. They’ve built the platform, now turn it over to the community and let people bid for parts creations with a user rating system and then Upverter takes a 15% cut. Each part needs to be verified by a separate user and the fewer modifications needed the more $ to the parts creator, the more modifications needed the more $ to the verifier.

I agree they seem like a good crew so I don’t want to sound like I’m constantly bashing on them.

#5

I’m coming across a few more bugs one of which is troubling to say the least. Although I haven’t gotten confirmation yet from the UV team I’m seeing a length matching constraint problem where nets show “unknown” even though everything is fully connected. I’m just guessing here but I suspect it’s because these connections traverse vias.

The reason this is troubling is how can lengths be calculated without knowing the width of substrates in the pcb? As far as I’m aware there is no way to specify this in UV. Obviously I’ll have to wait to hear back if this is indeed the case but if so I’m having a hard time reconciling this kind of bug with continuing to pay for this software. It certainly doesn’t make me confident that any of the other constraints are correctly calculated.

This is supposed to be the github of hardware. Yet the whole point of github (and ostensibly upverter) is to colloborate. But any design worth or requiring collaboration means that it’s going to be non-trivial in complexity or size. Yet any design big enough causes massive performance slowdowns not to mention the aforementioned bugs being an issue.

Here’s what I’m left with thinking: UV seems to be a good tool. It’s hard stuff doing this right and I get that and props to their team for getting a lot of this working. On the other hand I’m left scratching my head that some of the advertised features fall flat on their face when applied. I don’t even know or care anymore what “simulation coming soon” means. Concierge seems to be a failed experiment at this point. And now I’m even left worrying if I send out for a prototype manufacturing job for $4K for 4 boards that the length matching and tolerance constraints I so diligently spent time fixing are not actually going to be correct.

I accidentally moved a pour (which triggered a bunch of constraint violations obviously) and it locked up my 3GHz i5-based Chrome browser for 10 MINUTES! :slight_smile: I mean what?! [head scratch] :sob: Due to their use of Google pubsub libraries it caused my other Chrome window to lock up because ostensibly the sessions are x-connected. This means if 2 or more people are working on the same design and someone accidentally (or purposefully) does something to lock up everyone else’s session then what good is this? Even deleting a trace causes 30 second delays!

I hate to say it but this is a serious issue to say the least. I don’t really know what is going on with other web-based EDA offerings right now so I don’t know if this is a problem that those other tools experience. Seems fairly critical if UV is expecting any robust kind of design work to be attempted on their platform.

Am I the only one seeing these kinds of problems? Am I the only one who thinks $100/$125 is too much at this point?

And will Hope and Stefano ever get back together!? Sorry I haven’t watched Days of our Lives in 30 years and not sure why that just came to me. Being a little melodramatic I guess. I have no idea if Hope and Stefano are even in that situation.

#6

Hey @ekeyser I think Steve started working on your issues yesterday. I’m not sure if he sent you a note or not. I’ll check in with him on an ETA.

#7

Hey all,

I just wanted to try and shed some light on what you’ve all been going through lately. But for starters I’m sorry that we haven’t been delivering up to the standard you deserve. We haven’t been as responsive as we’d all like lately, we’ve had a few more bugs than usual with much slower squash times, and the concierge has been so slow to turn around for the past 2 months. Its frustrating. I know it makes it hard to get your work done and I’m sorry.

The backstory is a hodgepodge of things, but if I boil it down:

  • Victim of our own success: The concierge was more popular than we ever expected. It literally buried the company for 4 months. We are only now digging out from under its weight. We lost a lot of time scaling up to service all the part requests, restructuring the company around the concierge, and now more recently recruiting and training a huge team of contractors all over the world to service the queue.

  • Focused too much on version 4: We shipped a huge amount of product in the summer and fall and then fell behind on bug fixes. We’ve had this happen once before and it takes a proper support team, a proper QA team, and a huge top down push from me to be disciplined about stability. We haven’t had this lately because I’ve been betting so heavily on our concierge and our next big feature release. The guys would love to fix more bugs, and to have more engineers working on stability, but I’ve been forcing them to stay focused on the next release only stopping to fix the most burning and critical issues.

  • Capital: We are profitable and about to raise a new round of funding. But unfortunately we are in a pinch right now. We are operating on our revenue, and we can’t dump a bunch of money into support or QA or success because there just isn’t that much left over from our last round of financing. We still want to launch V4 before we raise. And even then it will be a couple months until we close our next capital. In the meantime we are trying to be everything to everyone but also careful with our spend. Which means everyone is getting pulled in a lot of different directions right now and its slowing us down and making it hard to be as supportive and responsive as we want to be.

  • Metrics: The reason I’m so excited about version 4 of upverter (more on this in the next couple weeks) is our distribution of paid to free users is out of wack. We had staffed up our sales, support and success teams expecting a much higher percentage of paying users. We actually built and launched the parts concierge to fix this exact problem, and it did a little bit, but not enough. In the end the vast majority of our users are on one of our free tiers. We’re in a funny spot where we have a ton of users, lots of utilization, super engaged users, but our best and most active users tend not to be paying customers. Most people think we’re charging too much, when we are already at the very low end of the market. And I realize that fixing the issues with Upverter makes it easier - but I think its an order of magnitude kind of problem. Hell, even our competitors like Altium and Mentor Graphics are releasing free tools to compete with us and drive the market towards cheaper and freer tools. It makes it hard to do sales, and hard to raise money as a SAAS pay-per-month company. And so in our quest to solve our metrics we came up with Upverter version 4. We realize now that we aren’t going to build the big company we wanted to by charging big monthly fees. So we’ve been trying to solve this. We think it looks like freer tools and more paid marketplace features like the parts concierge.

All of that doesn’t change that I’m sorry and the team is sorry that we haven’t been doing more for you lately. Its frustrating for us to. I wish we could do everything, and even more realistically I wish we had enough capital today to solve just today’s issues.

We’re doing our best to stay on top of support. And we’ve got as many people squashing bugs as we possibly can right now. Im sorry its been so hard lately. And its going to start getting better very soon. We are adding 7 new contractors to our parts concierge labour force this week. And hopefully upwards of 100 by March. We’re launching the first bit of Upverter 4 in 2 weeks. And our next fundraise is looking very promising. We’ve had a rough couple months, but its going to turn around very soon.

Thanks for your patience. Keep sending us requests. Keep telling us whats broken. And let me know what I can do to make it more bearable over the next couple weeks.

Zak

#8

Many thanks, @zak. I think everyone appreciates your clarifications.

You say you have a lot of active free users. I bet if you cut the price in two the number of paying users would quadruple :wink:

Another idea: how about charging per hour? I’m pretty sure there are ways to estimate the number of changes done to a design during certain time. Then you could charge the user let’s say 0.1 USD per hour if the amount of changes is above certain level.

#9

@zak many thanks for the update and certainly wish the best of luck to you. No doubt starting and running a company is difficult and things rarely work out the way you plan.

It’s hard not to be fearful of what big players are doing but I used CircuitMaker and it’s fine for what it is but it’s not Upverter nor is it the future of EDA - it’s just a cheap version of Designer and one that requires Windows. And big players are always fearful of cannibalizing existing product sales so I doubt they would build an Upverter-like version of their software anyway.

Best of luck to you and your team and keep in touch on the forum every once in a while! Good luck getting that funding.

#10

This was a very reassuring post and quite timely in fact, I was about to cancel my subscription due to the same aforementioned issues.

Why don’t you let the community help you? There are thousands of users happy to fix or extend the functionality of your tool through the API? You just need to invest a bit more time in documenting that area.

Finally, I hate false publicity, and the fact that you still have “Auto Render” as part of your features (which was actually the convincing factor for me to move from free to paid user) is quite unsettling, even more when not even the STL export works properly sometimes.

Cheers!

A.

#11

There should be a “pay what you feel like” option for those of us who are working exclusively on Open Hardware designs. I don’t need any of the paid features, but I would like to throw some money at bug fixes (as my finances allow).

Finding and reporting at least one bug per design hasn’t been an issue for me, because, so far the bugs have been fixed quickly. Only one bug really prevented forward progress, and that was fixed in less than 2 hours.

#12

Thanks @Zac for the update!

I was a paying customer for 2 months until I got fed up with the Part creation service taking weeks to get a part created. I also hated that any part I made manually took one of my credits which ate all of them instantly.

I figured if I can do everything I wanted on the free service then why am I paying $125 a month for the part service that does not deliver. So for now I’m on the free service but I am more than happy to pay when the part service lives up to how it’s advertised to work.

I’d feel better if you did have a lower cost monthly fee and pay as you need part creation service. That makes more sense to me.

You guys might want to send out a survey to all the free customers and ask them what they would be willing to do or what they would like to see and pay for and then give it to them. You guys would not upset people if you just put the part service on Beta status or just let people know its running really behind right now. That way people know what to expect and why, that was the single biggest frustration when starting out with you guys.

I have spent about 1 or 2 hours a day for the last 30 days doing schematic layout and it has so far went perfectly fine without any issues that I can think of so I’m happy with Upverter as far as that goes, it sure in the hell is 100% better than KiCad and how pieced together that is. I mean Upverter is a dream to use compared to all I had to do in KiCad, so much more intuitive and streamlined. Keep moving forward.

Looking forward to v4 of your software and I really want to see you guys succeed so I hope you get that new round of funding and I hope you get the issue fixed and I think you are sitting on a pile of income your not taking advantage of because your simply not asking your current customer base what exactly they are willing to pay for now and giving it to them. I think you need to tweak what your doing just a tad to get much more out of what your doing.

Either way keep pushing forward you guys are serving a nice market need so keep improving and keep trying new stuff and most importantly keep asking for feedback from your customers considering they will ultimately decide if you guys stay alive or die.

Support via Intercom has always been there for me and always been rather quick so I have no complaints about the support you guys are providing.

Keep up the good work!

#13

Thanks for all the support guys. It means a lot to us!

#14

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