Vector Magic Leaves Stanford: No Longer Free – Desktop Coming Soon
I’m rather sad to be reporting this one, but Vector Magic, the awesome free online vectorizing service is no longer free. It looks like the creators behind the service have left Stanford to make a desktop version of the popular software, which will be selling for a price that has yet-to-be-decided. Personally, I prefer Vector Magic over Live Trace in Illustrator, but that may change if the price isn’t right. Vector Magic is a single-function software. It’s nice, but It only does one thing. I can’t see myself paying more than $50 for a software that only does one thing, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
If you visit the Vector Magic website (again, no longer at Stanford: http://www.vectormagic.com) you’ll notice that they are selling “tokens” for the service. I’m not sure about the reasoning behind tokens, and I haven’t bought any yet, but if you look at the offer details, they are trying to motivate early adopters by letting you put your first $50 worth of token purchases towards the price of the desktop software when it’s released.
There are some pretty slick apps out there for less than $50 that do much more than a single task. Take Pixelmator for example. It’s only $49, it has one of the slickest UI’s around, and is packed with features. Another example: Vectoraster. It’s only $15, and it’s pretty much a single-function app. Textmate is another one worth mentioning.
The good news is the Vector Magic desktop app will support both Windows XP and Vista, as well as OS X 10.3 or later. (No Linux Support announced at this time) We’ll just have to wait and see if the price is right!
Tags: Vector Magic, Vectorize
This is ashame! I only hope, like you said, that the price will stay reasonable… even then I don’t know if I’d pay for when I already have Live Trace. I liked VM and used it a lot! Oh well…
They did make a good tracing webapp, but somehow I felt that I lost control while using it, something I wouldn’t do in Freehand, Inkscape or Illustrator.
Perhaps its a good way to make Adobe redevelop their tracing. Even Inkscape is faster and better than Illustrator when it comes to tracing.
@Ebsen,
I agree, even before Vector Magic, I used Inkscape as well.
bad move, imo, for vector magic. unless there is going to be more to this desktop version i think it’d be a total waste of $50 especially with live trace and inkscape’s tracing software out there. they got a lot of publicity on the different blogs i read, and could have probably made as much if not more in advertising on their website then they will in the selling of their software.
Yeah, I guess they don’t realize they aren’t the only show in town. I won’t be paying more than $50 for a desktop version (if that).
I used VM a lot, and loved the free-ness of it…. It was very helpful for my work to the point that now that they charge I am more inclined to pay for the service than go back to hand-tracing the super complex images I work with regularly. Right now it costs between $2-3 per vector which is a bit steep considering some vectors don’t always work out even when you think they do at first….
Their software is irreplaceable tho and have really not found any other software that compares. For fun or hobby related things tho, I don’t think I will be using VM any longer since it does not pay off the same way as it does when work is paying for it…. Darn.
I too think it’s a bad move for them to charge by the vector…. There are many other ways web-apps can be profitable, but charging the users defies the whole purpose of a web-app…
Also, I would prefer that VM say a web-app…. I like having access to it wherever I am. I would not really need a desktop version if the web version exists…
I doubt they will re-think their business model now, but I think they aught to……….
NEOOOOOOO!!!!!
Man I hope the program stays simple and easy to use. Please be Mac compatible!!!
$50? No way!
I wrote on the survey form that they should offer it as a $10-20 plugin for Photoshop.
Maybe they could work out licensing deals with the lesser known raster editors, like Seashore and Pixelmator.
c’était trop beau pour être vrai ;( !
Sounds like most reactions to this are sad — I know mine are! I’m going to miss VectorMagic being free, and while I respect the rights of the creators, I also posit that its popular success was in large part due to being accessible and costing nothing (for the user). I can understand if the creators feel they need to charge, but they may have a hard time expanding their audience… especially if more free/extremely inexpensive alternatives arise!
@Joey: I’d like it to be a Photoshop plugin too, that’d be a lot more convenient.
It sounds like it’s going to cost MORE than $50 to me:
“they are trying to motivate early adopters by letting you put your first $50 worth of token purchases towards the price of the desktop software when it’s released.”
If you put $50 TOWARD THE PURCHASE of something, it must by definition cost MORE than $50.
They’re high on crack if they think they’ll be able to sell VM in high volumes for more than $50. My guess is that they just want to get it out there, make a splash and HOPE that Adobe or Corel come along and buy them.
you can’t trust any company with a logo like that
Loved the comment above.
Apparently they left college to work full-time on a software that will not sell itself very well, as most people are fortunately not as stupid as them.
I don’t mind paying, but $2.63 per file seems a bit excessive. When I took the VM survey, they asked, Would you pay $0.25 per file? Absolutely. Somehow that figure got multiplied by 10. To make matters worse, they introduced a ridiculous token system. I guess they must have noticed corporate clients who are willing to pay that much and deal with the extra hoops. For me, personally, VectorMagic has morphed into VectorHubris. Thankfully, I only used it a couple of times, so I haven’t developed any addiction. Somehow I knew it was too good to be true. I am curious what will be the outcome of their move. It’s inevitable that a move from free to fee will create a shakeout. What I wonder is whether what I see are missteps in pricing and positioning are real or I am simply not the target customer.
for the few times i used it online, i would have paid a 1 or 2 dollar per usage fee. to pay 50$ for the software is ridiculous. not worth that much money too me, no matter how big the project is, there’s too many alternatives to it.
I really liked VM’s black and white output over that of livetrace or inkscape, but it still only does ONE thing, and not much better than the other programs I already have. What they got going on now is already insane! 2.50 per vector? I don’t hold out much hope for under 50$.
This is shame :(
If you put $50 TOWARD THE PURCHASE of something, it must by definition cost MORE than $50.
Great Help
Thank you.
I am curious what will be the outcome of their move
I do a lot of inked illustrattion, before coloring I use VM for tracing the illustration instead using illustrator live trace.
I can’t afford spending $50 just for tracing my work.
Definetly bad move, i see other apps are able to make money without having its user pay for the app.
Yeah it’s a shame. I used it a lot since I saw it posted here on bittbox. It made my life a lot easier in many occasions, specially for the speed projects on my Quark class, when the teacher only gave us a low res logo. That was the case tonight, and that’s why I noticed the change. I recurred to live trace instead, which actually worked, but it wasn’t always the case. Thank you for keeping us up to date bitt.
Re: Their logo
I has gotten worse with each generation of it. It seemed as if in an attempt to make it more complex it just got ugly. Also it counters the purpose of their product which it to make things cleaner and streamlined.
An Ai plug-in would be cool, but I don’t think it will happen simply because Adobe wouldn’t like the competition, just a thought. Although I am getting better with the live trace stuff in CS3, Vector Magic was nice to set and bookmark, walk away or keep working on other assignments, then go back and download the eps file. I had a couple of ornaments that would have been a pain to remap, turned out good.
About the logo. Those look like Google colors, get rid of the stupid black stroke on everything. It looks cheapened like a bad t shirt design.
I bookmarked VM’s site after I saw it here on bittbox, then when I finally needed to use it, they were charging a fee. I was like, WTF? Forget it.
They use all of these bloggers to get a name for themselves and then stick it to people by not even offering a 30 demo or something. Lame.
I won’t be purchasing it. Even the example files I tried it on needed lots of modification to make it look professional, so if I have to do the work afterwards anyway, I’d just rather do the entire file myself in Illustrator.
[...] BittBox beat me to the punch earlier this week getting the word out about Vector Magic’s decision to start charging folks for raster-to-vector conversions. I personally found Vector Magic to do a better job than Adobe Illustrator at conversions so I am sorry to see this happen and think the base prices seem too high (starting out at $2.63 for a single conversion). There’s promise of a desktop application, but with indications that it will cost over $50, most designers are none too pleased about that either. [...]
This is really total crap!! I loved Vector Magic and i know these money craving fucknuts are gonna try and stick a giant metal razor sharp dildo up everyones ass and twist it around until we all vomit shit from our noses.. How do you take something free and wonderful, that is clearly just a benefit to mankind and stick a fucking $2.73 cent virtual reality token dispenser on it?? I fucking hate you Stanford bastards…it was a wonderful thing having that site free…a gift, that made the world a better place…..now you are no better than the other putrid shit members of modern corporate America. Thanks you cocksuckers for making technology and art a tool for only those with money….bastards!
damn .. that really is sad news :(
BittBox Blog…
bittbox – Homemade vector freebies, design tips, tutorials and bitts….
If you register before March 5th you get 4 tokens free- get on it before you get nothing free.
Bastards! Ah well, I guess we will just have to wait until some other startup puts one out for free. Or stop being lazy and create them on our own heh.
Why wouldnt they just leave it free and make the money off advertising?
It is really a shame I used it too . ..
Yeah I nearly cried when I saw that — I loved VM at Stanford. The quality was near-enough-is-good-enough but I loved it for the simplicity of the shapes it produces, something I could never squeeze out of Illustrator’s Live Trace. $50 is a lot but if it came with a couple of years’ updates I would seriously consider it. I work in the non-profit sector where everyone has only a crufty old bitmap logo from the mid-90’s, so VM was a godsend.
That’s a shame about VM. I became addicted rather quickly. It’s intuitive and as precise as one could hope for. I agree with whoever said it up above, it can’t be a web app for a fee and still be considered a web app. I completely understand that they need to make money off of it, damn it had like 3600 diggs. They’d be fools to not prosper off of it’s popularity/superiority.
If I were VM I would make whatever moves required to get acquired by Adobe. Adobe’s a huge company and Live Trace, just doesn’t cut the mustard quite like VM. Between Inkscape and Corel, Adobe’s already behind the curve on vectorization and if it’s painfully apparent to me, I’m sure there’re teams of intelligent adults over at Adobe living the reality of inferior vectorization. With their resources, I’m sure they can match and outdo VM’s capabilities just by deciding to. But wouldn’t it just be cheaper to acquire and integrate VM? Who knows? It seems like they’re very “hungry” over there at VM, so it could go either way and not surprise me.
What would surprise me is if CS4 (or whatever they’re gonna call it) didn’t include bitmap vectorization functionality >= that which VM brings to the table. Imagery is what Adobe does and they’re always looking for ways to improve. 3600 diggs are very noisy.
All you have to do is get multi emails addresses, and they give you 2 free tokens…. I have 100 left.
Well, it’s *not* reasonably priced AND they give you a nice little virus with your download! Way to ruin a potentially great product!
295 WTF!~
$295 for an application that does 1 thing! WTF? They gotta be nutz!
Bizen, What Virus?
REASONABLE PRICE!??!
189 DOLLARS!!!
you, thieves!
exc: 189 euros!
Its sad that such an insanely handy piece of software is so insanely overpriced and a completely unrealistic purchase, even for design companies.
I don’t think it’s too much for software that can save hours and hours of tedious manual tidy up. The other vector conversion apps are useless for CNC conversion as they leave way too much noise.
As an ex-software developer this attitude that all software should cost peanuts or be free really annoys me.
Plus there’s no virus that’s just over sensitive scanners.
nice site thks http://www.cinselsorunlariniz.com
Cleaning up bitmaps is always a drag for any designer. In cases where that occurs, users may find Vector Magic handy.
http://www.i-cliqq.com
I-Cliqq Professional Embroidery software, allows conversion of vectors to stitchtypes, and having clean art can speed up the entire process.
Most users however, usually opt for Coreldraw or Illustrator which are full graphics creation packages.
I-Cliqq allows full manipulation of vector lineart for the purposes of embroidery. Hard economics means that users do look very much at affordability, but sometimes having the right tools is not just about initial cost. Sometimes a general user that is attracted by just ‘cheap’ ends up actually losing more in the longterm, because cheap, does not always mean ‘productive functionality’ , and in an industry where time is always of the essence, its good to be prudent in such thoughts.
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