Turn off/disable concierge for selected parts

Does anyone know how to not trigger concierge part requests for parts that haven’t been verified? I’ve seen my requests drop down by 2 in the past 2 days even though I haven’t added any parts to my projects. Support doesn’t seem to be answering emails.

Actually it’d just be great to only use concierge requests when I need them for complicated parts. Each time I add a freaking resistor it triggers a request even though I can easily go in and do it myself after the fact. I don’t want to create from scratch though - I just want to select pre-existing parts in the DB and create/verify the footprint myself. Make sense? Am I asking too much you think?

Our working theory for the parts concierge is that users want 100% of the parts in their design verified. That we want 100% of the parts in the library verified. And that every time we’re missing a part it should be created as quickly and on-demand as possible and then verified shortly there after (prior to manufacturing), and more throughly.

Where this breaks down is on little parts, simple parts, part that should exist in the upverter library already for the common good, parts users already have in different software systems, etc. For each of these parts paying to get that part again feels a little painful. Paying for something we should already have seems similarly painful. I know other tools don’t do this, and their libraries generally suck - but we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Our goal is not to run down your number of requests, or overly penalize you personally for contributing to the community good of Upverter. Ideally we want you to use the concierge all the time, and never run out of requests. The limit exists just to incentivize good behavior with the concierge to make sure people are requesting real, useful and necessary parts.

The new stuff we’re about to launch includes more pay-per-part concierge features, and more on-demand labour services, so you can pick and choose when and what you use. In the meantime I’m happy to give anyone thats running low on concierge requests and feels like they need a few more a top up.

For me this was one of the most frustrating parts of the Concierge service other than it taking forever to get a part created.

All my simple parts that I created from already verified parts had to be re-verified which cost my most of my part creating credits. This was the reason I went back to the free plan since the only real benefit I received from paying $125 was part credits that just got eaten up by simple parts I created that were not in the database already but there was similar same sized footprints that were verified that I could work with as a starting point.

I agree a way to choose what parts you want verified would be a big step forward for the customer.

Looking forward to the new features. I really want to support Upverter but it has to make sense from my end also.

Keep pushing forward guys!

How about not reducing the concierge credits for these little, simple parts? It will cost the concierge team time to do it but it will benefit everyone and the library will be better.

Perhaps any part with ≤4 pins would be considered a little part and would not charge against the user’s credits.

If you’re trying to conserve your free credits then the little simple parts seem like the best ones to make yourself.

The concierge never meant you can’t make parts yourself. Now ideally you upgrade, buy a subscription, and use it to make every part in your design so that you never need to worry that a part is wrong and going to cause problems during manufacturing. But if you don’t want to upgrade, and you want to get the most milage from the free credits we give you on signup - then the best way I can think of is to make the simple parts for yourself.

@zak - that’s what this thread is about. You can’t make parts yourself. If you have credits, and you make a part, it triggers concierge automatically.

Hey Guys,

I looked into this - and thats not exactly correct. Let me explain…

You can always make parts for free. Making a part doesn’t ever cost a credit. It doesn’t matter if you are free, or paid, or anything else. You are contributing to the Upverter library and we want to encourage that. The concierge only looks for usage. When you use a part we check if its previously been made, or verified and queue it for the concierge as appropriate.

Where the confusion comes in is that most people edit parts by first adding them to their design and then opening them to edit them. The problem is we immediately queue the request the second you add the part to the design. We don’t later check to see if you’ve already made it. To edit a part without queuing it into the concierge (ie without costing a request) you need to open up the part page and click the edit button there. Then you can edit the part, and add it to your design once it has a symbol and footprint.

The concierge works in one of two ways right now. Either you’re a free user and the concierge creates any part that is missing a symbol or footprint that you use. Or you’re a paid user and the concierge creates any part that is missing a symbol or footprint that you use, and then additionally verifies every part that you use. This difference is temporary and within a few weeks we will get back to verifying 100% of parts used by both free and paid users (we turned it off for free users because we fell way behind verifying parts).

But as long as verification is disabled as a free user you can make your own parts without spending your free requests by using the above method, opening the part page and editing from there.

All of this is a lot of work, and I understand the workflow is clumsy but I need to reiterate that its not how we want you to use Upverter. In this regard Upverter is optimized for users with paid accounts, and paid part subscriptions. We’ve optimized the workflow such that every part a user interacts with gets checked, every part you need gets made, and every time you go to manufacturing you can trust that your board will work.

We do give users some free concierge requests when they signup, but these aren’t supposed to be an asset; 5 parts is hardly enough to do anything with. They are supposed to be a demo of the magic of the parts concierge. The smoothness you get to experience when you subscribe and pay for Professional Upverter or a parts subscription. We didn’t optimize for users to only make their hardest parts with the free requests, we optimized for users to make every part with the concierge.

For our paid users, we are also frustrated by how low the 20 per month limit seems. The limit is just supposed to protect us. We don’t actually want to limit usage. We don’t want you to ever feel bad using a request because you have so many of them. We’d much prefer to have unlimited requests for ever user. This limit was supposed to be enough that you would never need to make another part by hand.

Unfortunately our costs of operating the concierge are still a bit on the high side. Right now if a user requests only hard parts with their 20 per month we lose money. We’re working to get these costs down, and we’re working to increase the number of parts a user can request per month. But its going to take time. In the short term we are going to be selling add-ons for more requests, packages and subscriptions that cost money but allow you to request more than 20 per month.

I hope that all make sense, let me know if you have any other questions!

@zak Is it possible to get clarification on the verification side of things? I think there’s a disconnect between what you’re saying and what the reality is. I have probably 60 parts that have been in queued status for verification for about 2-3 months now and this of course is ignoring the matter of the ETA of 3d or 60min for each part.

I get that you want all designs to be using verified components - I do too! :slight_smile: But the reality is that this isn’t what’s going on. Right now parts get created (sometimes) and then sit in the verification queue for lord knows how long.

By the way, in regards to the matter of people inadvertently using their parts requests I would say that this is a case of poor or non-ideal ux design being forced down users’ throats. Clearly the workflow isn’t what people seem to be expecting and quite frankly that expected behavior seems rational especially given that there is no counter for concierge parts to keep people aware of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Let me put it this way: UV asks users fairly consistently about how they feel about the service/tool and yet when feedback is given (in this case anyway) it is discarded or invalidated in favor of what they should be doing. That’s not a recipe for getting people excited for using the tool. Even a simple modal dialog saying “This will use one of your concierge requests. Do you want to proceed? [Yes] [Create Part Myself]” would probably resolve most of the confusion.

Of course!

Regarding the long wait times on verification, we’ve been building a piece of software to automatically verify parts through a bit of magic, a bit of statistical analysis, and a bit of human labour (but in a way where we don’t have to be sure any individual humans work is correct). Its been taking longer than we expected, but we’ve been trying to keep a good pulse on which paying users need verification for manufacturing and doing those by hand, and which we can wait on. Its not ideal, and it will be temporary - though it has taken a little longer than we had expected it too. My guess is in the next week or so we will begin processing the verification queue and a few days later we should be completely up to date.

For what its worth, our expectation is most parts in the queue are quite correct. We have made a ton of improvements to the process such that we really don’t see too many creation errors anymore. That said we will know for sure once its all been processed.

@Zak Just wanted to say I sent a part creation request for a odd part that was not in the database and was going to take some time to create manually.

I’m happy to say that the Part footprint and symbol was created in 9 hours which I’m totally happy with :smiley:

That just made my life easier today :wink: