Onward ...
OctoPrint Anywhere is now succeeded by The Spaghetti Detective, a faster and more powerful remote monitoring tool for OctoPrint. It also, as the name implies, detects print failures using AI.
My original plan, as announced in this blog, was to ramp down OctoPrint Anywhere entirely. However, some users have since brought to my attentions some scenarios that I didn't anticipate.
And hence I changed my initial plan and made the decision to maintain OctoPrint Anywhere as a subscription-only service indefinitely.
What's the final plan to bring OctoPrint Anywhere onward?
OctoPrint Anywhere is now a subscription-only service. Current PRO/PRO+ subscribers will be able to use the service just as they did before.
OctoPrint Anywhere free service has ended as of February 1st, 2020.
If, for some reason, The Spaghetti Detective doesn't work for you, you can still sign up for an OctoPrint Anywhere account. You will have 15 days of free trial for OctoPrint Anywhere's PRO plan. When the free trial ends, you will need to either upgrade to PRO/PRO+ plan, or lose access to OctoPrint Anywhere service.
OctoPrint Anywhere Free plan worked well for me. Why did you choose to end it?
There are 2 important reasons for this decision:
The Spaghetti Detective free plan works just as well, if not better. Not a single user has become less happy after moving from OctoPrint Anywhere free plan to The Spaghetti Detective free plan.
Maintaining 2 plugins and 2 cloud server clusters is just A LOT OF WORK. Since The Spaghetti Detective has been better designed and implemented, runs faster, and has more cool features such as AI-based failure detection than OctoPrint Anywhere. It just makes sense for me to focus my effort on one of them. Otherwise, neither of them will improve as fast as I'd like them to.
Why did you choose to keep PRO/PRO+ service alive?
After I announced the news that OctoPrint Anywhere will be succeeded by The Spaghetti Detective, the responses from our users was outpouring.
Most subscribers told me how excited they are about the AI feature in The Spaghetti Detective, as well as the better video streaming experience. However, some subscribers did run into issues that prevented video streaming The Spaghetti Detective from working as well as it did in OctoPrint Anywhere. One such scenario is that video streaming in The Spaghetti Detective has very short delay (2-3 seconds), and hence makes it more susceptible to a bad network connection. Whereas the longer delay (about 10-15 seconds) in OctoPrint Anywhere's video streaming, which is usually a bad experience, makes it more resistent to all kinds of network conditions.
Since OctoPrint Anywhere free users don't have premium webcam streaming, they are not impacted by such difference at all. That's why none of them had worse experience after moving to The Spaghetti Detective.
OctoPrint Anywhere subscribers are the ones who have supported me all along. Without them, OctoPrint Anywhere or even The Spaghetti Detective wouldn't be where they are today. I feel the obligation to reciprocate their support with my commitment to not leave any of them high and dry in this transition. That's why I have decided to maintained OctoPrint Anywhere PRO/PRO+ services for a small amount of subscribers who found The Spaghetti Detective video streaming not working for them.
- Kenneth Jiang, Developer of OctoPrint Anywhere and The Spaghetti Detective