What’s the deal?
The world is more interconnected than ever.
What is the nature of those connections?
What is the deal between the interconnected parties?
I mean “deal” in the financial sense, and I mean “deal” in the relational sense.
The history of the Internet, social media, and now AI, is unfortunately fraught with too many examples of popular products whose users do not understand the actual deal that is being made between them and the service.
It is not the purpose of this post to enumerate which tech companies are the most evil. The point that I’m trying to make here can simply be summarized in the classic quote:
If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
As neThing begins to grow, I want to be very clear about the deal between us and our users.
Vision
My vision for neThing.xyz is to create a generative AI tool that generates truly useful 3D CAD models from straightforward natural language prompts.
I founded polySpectra with a mission to help engineers make their ideas real. With neThing we can dramatically expand the number of people who can participate in engineering.
My hope is that this audacious goal can be realized through the support of our community.
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By “support”, I mean time, attention, and money.
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By “community”, I mean you.
I would strongly prefer not to raise additional venture capital to pay for the development of neThing.xyz. Despite best intentions, this form of capital will inevitably create additional separation between our company and our community of users.
On the other hand, every dollar of support from our community brings us closer to our community.
Along these lines, I have been particularly inspired by Midjourney and their deep commitment to remaining primarily user-funded.
So what’s the deal between you and me?
What’s the deal between anything.xyz and its users?
Pricing
Free Tier
- Free to use up to a monthly limit of AI credits (currently 30)
- Pay as you go to buy more AI credits
- All generations are public (see below)
Pro Tier
- 333 monthly AI credits included
- Pay as you go to buy more AI credits
- All generations are public (see below)
- Access to subscriber-only features
- Access to beta features
Subscribe to Pro
Business Tier (coming soon)
- Even higher monthly limit of AI queries
- Pay as you go to buy more AI credits
- Generations can be set to private
- Access to subscriber-only features
- Access to beta features
Your Activity & Creations
Our decision to make generations public by default is very much inspired by Midjourney.
There are a number of benefits of taking this approach.
First, it will provide a rich showcase of examples for both humans and AI to learn from.
Second, it means that even users who aren’t able to contribute financially are contributing to the overall community goal of making an amazing text-to-CAD generative AI tool.
Finally, it encourages sharing and openness, which is absolutely essential for a product that strives to be community-supported.
What is your money going towards?
Your money is helping to shape the future of engineering.
Your money is dramatically accelerating the timescale and cost of turning ideas into reality.
That’s what “make it real” means.
More specifically, your subscription helps…
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Pay for AI inference costs in parentheses, both your own as well as the limited number of free queries that we can offer our nonpaying community members.
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Pay for the digital infrastructure associated with computing, storing, transferring, and sharing your amazing creations all over the internet.
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Paying for both human and AI team members’ attention.
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Making the product faster, better, cheaper, and simply more amazing.
Communication and Access
Forum first : We will strive to have this forum be the primary location for information-sharing. Our intention is to share here first, or at least in sync with other communication channels such as email and social media.
Supporters first: New features will be first offered to paying subscribers. Some of these features may stay as subscriber-only features, others may eventually roll out to the free tier.