Forums » CircuitLab Support Forum

Two years ago, I stumbled this website via google when I was seeking a handful tool for my course project in digital circuit class. This website came across as concise and professional and I subscribed the “Hacker Lite - Annual” plan happily. It served me well for that project, although it is the only project I used this website for.

However, the story went down several days ago. My credit card company texted me that CircuitLab renewed my annual plan for this year at $79, which was not expected and I didn’t received any pre-notification for my renewal! Up to now, the story still looks like a normal customer service issue concerning some commercial company. OK, it’s just a business so just solve it the way as any other usual business would do. It looks like the only two ways CircuitLab opened for communication is 1. this forum and 2. the “support” email address at their https://www.circuitlab.com/about/contact/ page. I wrote a detailed email to support@circuitlab.com explaining why the charge does not reflect my genuine intension thus the membership must be canceled and I‘d like to be refunded. Guess what? 10+ days have passed and they even don’t care to reply!??? I doubt the existence of “the official support email”!

In fact, there are also other users complaining the same dilemma on this forum and links are listed below. It seems like he has not solved the problem yet.

1. https://www.circuitlab.com/forums/support/topic/kvhsc63a/cancel-membership/

I am disappointed that they seem to be cash-cowing the product, which was so promising when I joined a few years ago. I teach circuits and would love a simple to use, shareable online circuit simulator. If I want quality results but a bad UX, then I'm going with MultiSim, LTSpice, or Cadence. If I want a cheap product (free) but a bad UX, then I'm going with Falstad. But I want a good UX for teaching circuits, and there's not a lot of products in that space, so they are missing a sizable market segment.

I passed along a bunch of feedback that went nowhere:

• Have some kind of classroom license model

• Don't write your own textbook - there's a million circuits texts out there and it's not worth reinventing the wheel. Instead, pick one intro and advanced textbook and just create every circuit in the book as useful content. Make it fully accessible with some kind of term-based license that's student-friendly, knowing that most will walk away after the term but a certain percentage will become long term users

• Make transistor models more IC-friendly

• Please include a variable step solver that chooses reasonable time steps by default. This should not be difficult as there are many freely published approaches out there. I don't like having to set a delta t every time, and students would not know at what point they can't trust the results

• Animate current flows and voltages. It would greatly help students learn circuits.

• Have a non-raster image export, like SVG, or something I can easily rip apart to put your plots elsewhere at a decent resolution. My current workflow is to put CircuitLab pngs into Adobe Illustrator, have it auto-trace the line, then paste that into Visio where I have nice looking charts ready to go.

But, seeing as their blog lists 2021 as the last time a feature was introduced, it looks like they are just riding out license revenue until the product dies or the website gets purchased. Very, very disappointing.