Gigantic Thank You and Farewell to Early Access
Down Memory Lane
Forgive me if I get a little sentimental, but what a journey it’s been!
Do you remember when the website used to look like this?
Or this?
Or when we only had a Slack channel that was used for rendering? I had to manually render every job that came in and figure out every edge case.
You probably don’t remember when it was called JuiceRender and was only a wait-list in Late 2021.
Thank you!
Believe it or not, it’s been many years since we started conceptualizing Renderjuice and architecting what is now Renderjuice. We’re pretty proud of how far we’ve come. We get feedback from people on how we are “enabling <them> to run a studio from their own home” or that this is a “godsend” for them and are “single-handedly saving their asses”. It’s incredible to read and is honestly such great motivation to keep pushing forward through challenges. We’ve learned with experience why this is not an easy feat to accomplish due to the challenging build, but will continue to serve you as best as we can.
But we couldn’t have made this progress without you who have been with us from the beginning. We’ve had folks help us and be patient with us while we fixed little issues or even take the time to explain solutions that we needed to implement. For all that and more, we are truly grateful.
With that said, we’ve got our sights on the future. We’re pumped for what’s on the roadmap for the next year and we can proudly say that though the product is far from perfect, it is getting pretty damn good.
Ending Early Access Pricing and Perks for Early Users
Back at the very beginning of this journey, I had no clue what the journey would look like and it was an isolated and lonely process finding out if anyone would even care about what I, running solo at that time, was building. I remember hopping on random Discord channels and Blender forums to figure concepts out. I jumped on video calls with strangers across the world in the arch-viz world to find out how complex this could be. At one point, I even read through a render manager manual of 300 pages and read it from front to back, not once, not twice, but three times.
Once I actually jumped into the workload, I quickly realized I needed more hands on deck, the team grew with incredible and irreplaceable folks like Erlan and Khushnud jumping on-board. Being non-vc backed, everything was self-funded, and it wasn’t easy to make everything work out.
But more than anything, I desperately needed more information from Blender users. Consequently, prices at the time reflected that need for information and validation that rendering for Blender was even possible online and we tried to make it as compelling as an offer as possible by offering a significantly discounted price.
With the new progress we’ve made, we’ll proudly finally be reverting prices to what our original price targets were to reflect the end of early access. We’ll continue to experiment with prices in a way that is a good fit for people, and we’ll be including everyone eligible from Early Access to pick up very valuable perks along the way. We’ll also do our best to ensure Early Access users have discounts, extra perks, and where possible, the lowest rates available to show our gratitude.
With continuous experimentation, we hope to improve our plans so that ideally you’re not reloading GPU minutes nearly as much on the Studio plan while improving speeds, performance, and stability. On the performance side, we’ve got some pretty neat tricks up our sleeves to show in this arena, just you wait.
Eligible early access users should have received emails regarding their status and should see a badge reflected on the new profile page to demonstrate our gratitude. It should include discounts and extra perks, and I’ve personally written down every name that’s helped us get to where we are today. If you’re part of that list, you’ve probably spoken to me (Stevie) or Erlan before over chat. If you feel that you weren’t properly reflected on this list, or missing an email and have been with us since the beginning, please reach out, we’ll be happy to accommodate.
Thank you, once again. We’re gonna do you proud.
Stephen (with Erlan, Khushnud, Jeenbek, and the rest of the team)
Date: October 15, 2024
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