What We Got Wrong About ShapeDiver’s Free Plan (And How We Fixed It)

Earlier this year, we quietly introduced a pretty fundamental change to the features and functionality available to the free version of ShapeDiver’s platform. The elevator pitch version of this change is that far more Grasshopper models will work out of the box in the free version. We relaxed restrictions like the maximum computation time (we now offer 30 seconds instead of 10), and the use of scripted components is now allowed (C#, Python, VB) in this free tier. These two changes make this free version much more useful and less frustrating for Grasshopper users starting to explore our platform. Additionally, users of our free plan now receive 50 monthly credits to use this expanded range of features, such as exports and Augmented Reality.

In essence, the free version of ShapeDiver becomes a more useful product with tighter monthly usage limits.

I know that some of you may have strong opinions on changes like this, so let me take a minute to explain our thinking here. The other founders and I have been enthusiastic supporters of the open culture of the Rhino and Grasshopper community since we started working on our first Rhino plugin back in 2010-ish, and it was always clear that our company culture should reflect this. So while we obviously wanted to build a business, it was clear that we wanted to have some version of Grasshopper in the cloud accessible to students, enthusiasts, and others with big ideas and a low budget.

Our initial approach, which was reflected in our free version until last year, was to define a set of features and make them completely free without any usage restrictions. Back then, we imagined our platform as a place where users freely exchanged their designs and where even users of the free versions might publish models that many others would find useful. So we created a plan that would allow free models to go “viral” without punishing their authors by shutting down their accounts, but we limited the strain these models could put on our infrastructure.

Over time, we realized this was not the scenario that played out. Most of our users publish models on ShapeDiver for one of two reasons:

- To be used in design workflows by themselves or a group of colleagues and collaborators

- To publish them on a public website or shop as a configuration tool

Our previous free plan made the first case frustrating for many users because its restrictions on computation time and scripts, among other things, made it hard to get models to work out of the box. Publishing models on the web wasn’t possible at all.

Our new approach aims to solve this. We learned that most people don’t want their models to go viral; they want them to work seamlessly on ShapeDiver. So we lifted many of the roadblocks that commonly led to models being rejected on upload. And we paired that with an amount of credits that won’t allow you to work full-time on ShapeDiver every day (if you want to do that, we have various other plans for you), but is enough to get some meaningful work done if you need ShapeDiver occasionally.

We’re also thinking about ways to add some form of web publishing to our new free plan. We’re not quite there yet, as this has some additional implications for our product, but we’re open to suggestions.

To finish up, here’s a detailed list of changes introduced for the users of ShapeDiver’s free version. If you created a ShapeDiver account in the past but couldn’t get your models to run properly, I encourage you to try again and give us feedback on whether you noticed an improvement on forum.shapediver.com.