Hey Chuck, Im one of the founders at Upverter.

We based the pricing on our pilot users, and what they were willing to spend to be able to collaborate. We would love to chat if there is a different price you are willing to pay!

And for what its worth, we are working hard on PCB layout right now, and with any luck will be able to launch it in the next few months.

Pricing in the ECAD space is weird (you're probably aware) because it goes 'free' -> $1K -> $10K. with very few intermediate points. What is more, the number of people who have been burned by having something 'in the cloud' from a smallish supplier is growing. So having private designs that would be 'gone' if your servers were offline would be an issue. And lastly the biggest thing most people pay for these days is simulation anyway, and that is something easily charged for. You might consider 'free schematics' private or public, but $20 to generate a PCB from one. You could work out a scheme where if I publish a schematic using upverter and someone comes along they can 'buy' a PCB for it and you split the revenue share with the schematic creator. You can work a partnership with one of the PCB houses so that it 'just works' or you can send them a zip file of the various bits (gerbers, drill file, tool file, etc).

Something you might offer for 'free' would be something like Google's ChartServer API but 'schematic server' API. That is something I've been building in my spare time off and on. You are a lot closer than I am and I've yet to figure out if I want to use HTTP POST or a split URL syntax.

Can you imagine something like:

  <img src="http://upverter.com?sch=dropbox.com/chuck/schematics/foo.sch" height=200 width=300>

A way to embed the shared schematic in web pages or blogs, or whatever. Feel free to contact me offline for ideas on ways to monetize this kind of stuff.

Agree with you on the pricing, its a hard one. Lets chat sometime! Were totally on the same wavelength.

We are actually working on a transcriber (https://github.com/upverter/schematic-file-converter), dropbox integration. And behind the scenes were doing "print" button style manufacturing for our more enterprise users (ie. click print and we get a one-off manufactured and mailed to you)

Every upverter schematic has an embed code and a ton of our traffic is driven from people importing their schematics and sharing them on their blogs.

What's the possibility for making the site free, and paying for it by providing an integrated manufacturing or procurement service? (I notice your library already has "buy now" buttons next to components).

Various "buy now" buttons could deliver complete BOMs, circuit boards with BOMs, or turnkey products. A future move into mechanical CAD and graphics design could see a boxed product landing on the customer's doorstep.

Its a possibility. We have privacy by user request and were charing money for it, not least of all, because we want to encourage public designs.

Here's one. Can you get the software to recognise circuit topologies as they are being drawn, and suggest better topologies or components, based on what other circuits have been entered?

It strikes me that the difference between Upverter and any other EDA software is the collaborative/community aspect. Consequently Upverter's competitive advantage will arise from features that exploit the community aspect.

Thats a really cool idea. Similarily, we have been toying with the idea of auto-complete. Ie: You add a couple parts that we've seen connected before, you start to connect them in the same way, we recommend a way to hook them all up.

Also were working on the really simple things like just suggesting parts or implementations based other users designs.

Thanks for the ideas, I'd love to chat sometime!

What are you using for handling the subscription payments by the way? I mean things like prorating, checking who still has membership active etc.

Mostly handbaked into the app. As for payments, were processing in Canada using BeanStream. We open sourced our implementation here: https://github.com/upverter/beanstream