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But a disabling screen you can't click away every 10 minutes is unusable.

I'll just stuck with one of the many other free sims out there that doesn't nag me.

Hi @darthbaker,

Glad to hear it's useful! We'd like high-quality software to exist in this space. I'm sure you would too. And that means building a sustainable organization that can fund the operations and further development of CircuitLab. I hope we can find a way to make you a customer.

Also check out our Community Appreciation Pass for 3 months of Hacker Lite free-of-charge.

I was impressed with the progress you have made so far and was checking back about updates etc. Particually around the PCB side of things.

But the 10minute thing makes it frustrating to use and evaluate if long-term use is viable when compared to other free products like LT Spice.

I understand the need to pay for your work, but I feel there are more appropriate restrictions for the free version to encourage people to use and adopt circuitlab.

Examples of this are things like, limited number of components, limited pcb sizes and reduced export to external format options. These allow you to use the product properly but only for small projects for instance.

Nag screens were frustrating in the 80's and 90's and they're frustrating now. They result in me closing the tab and switching back to LT Spice or another product.

If you want free users to consider moving to paid users. They should want to stay free users, then outgrow the free package. In my opinion, the nag screens make free users want to use other products. It's the same as the free2play model for games, if you don't make the game fun for the people playing it for free what are the chances they'll put down some money for it?

Maybe we could "earn" our membership if we make some decent ( as judged by CircuitLab ) circuits public?

Note - submitted circuits to be specifically judged by CircuitLab admins - No one wants to see CL public area filled with useless junk that doesn't work. The circuits have to be nontrivial, and will simulate as shown.

Personally, I have submitted a few public circuits, and have some private stuff that does not work. The stuff I did submit works, albeit the component values may need to be altered for a custom solution to a specific need. I intended it for a starting point.

A useful repository of public circuits would be welcome. Kinda like those old Markus circuit books popular in the 60's. This would encourage people to create some useful sharable content. Like EDN "design ideas" stuff.

Following the nag screens with the unkempt bearded guy, I went from 'wow, these CircuitLab guys are soooo cool', to 'ok, I get it, bait and switch money grabbers'. I did sign up for the $5 per month plan, but it left a bad taste in my mouth and eroded my trust in the organization.

Hi all,

At the end of the day we are building software that people find useful and we as company need to be able to sustain those development efforts. It is certainly not our intention to make people angry or give people bad tastes in their mouth. In addition to providing non-commercial subscription levels at a deeply discounted $4.99, we are also offering our Community Appreciation pass that Mike mentioned above so folks who can't afford the $4.99 for CircuitLab can still have access to it.

Thanks to the many users who have already signed up, and we will continue to put out new features like smart wires and faster simulations!

Humberto

All well and good, but I for one will not attempt to evaluate if circuit lab is suitable for me nor recommend others evaluate it if I am interrupted every 10 minutes when doing a simple example circuit. I have better things to do with my time.

Good grief! This is a wonderful tool. The fee structure and the need for it make sense to me.

I give up with this app. All I'm looking for is a program that works like this one, http://icircuitapp.com/ but on a non-mobile Windows 7 platform.

There is so much free simulation offers that circuit lab only needed this 10min interruption to make me giving it up. I switch to QUCS.

Giving up too ! To many annoyance Bye !

Sad. Another great educational tool destroyed by money grabbing eager beavers. I'll just put it on the growing 'no longer useful' pile and move on. Very sad.

After you had done so much good work and attracted so much good will, you're going to squander it all for a quick buck, destroying CLs future in the process. I'm actually ashamed I recommended this site to others.

Take a look at what happened to every other nagware app. They alienate the very people they are trying to attract and ultimately fail, out-competed by non-nagware. How does that "build a sustainable organization"?

There's many other payware/freeware structures which could be adopted. And there's too many free alternatives for anyone to miss CircuitLab very much.

I might come back in a few weeks to see if you have woken up. But by then, I might be too used to a non-nagware alternative to bother.

Another user that says goodbye. I used it for simple example circuits in my classes and recommended it to my students (I'm a university professor). I can understand that you force paying for "big" circuits and commercial purposes, but nags and banners in exported circuits?

I'll look for some other tool. Bye.

I'm sorry to say it, butI have to agree with the other users. Look, I understand that you need to make money. I totally understand that. I'm not going to call you greedy or something of that sort, nor am I going to demand that you give me your best work free of charge. You are totally justified in trying to monetize CircuitLab. It takes money to pay developers, it takes money to keep the site running, etc.. HOWEVER... You are not taking the right path, and you risk ruining your product. I'm a high school student. I started using CircuitLab last year for simple diagrams that looked nice and clean. It was great. But the ten-minute nag screens and the weekly limit are not acceptable. The ads are fine; when I saw the little note about AdBlock on my computer, I immediately disabled Adblock. Time limits, however, seriously cripple CL's functionality. If you want to monetize CL--as you should--then I urge you to reconsider the ways in which you do it. For "free" users, give us ads. Restrict access to the most advanced capabilities and components.

I'm not quite sure if this is the best way to put it, but... what you guys are doing now is giving users a sub-par experience for free. What you need to do is give users a good experience for free, with the promise of a GREAT experience if they upgrade to a paid plan.

I love CircuitLab. It's easy to use, it looks nice, it works on my iPad. But it's just not usable with these artificial limitations, nag screens, and time limits.

Please consider what you're doing. You can either have CircuitLab be a popular, widely-used service, or you can have it be yet another great tool ruined by monetization. It's up to you, really.

D

P.S: if you can make a full-blown native iOS app, then I'd pay at least $10 for it without blinking. The multitouch version of the website is great, but needs some improvements. The drop-down menus are really not ideal on tablets.

P.P.S: apologies for any spelling mistakes; I typed this all up on my iPad.