I went with the Brother Skitch PP1. It's right around $300 on amazon. It has sub-par reviews, but I realized that most of those were because of the poorly built software and subscription fee. So far, it has worked really well for me! Edit: here is a video/image of a patch I made: https://x.com/simpsoka/status/2115254318161182876

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barcoder a day ago | parent | next [-]

In the past I've been really impressed by Brother products so I'm surprised to hear about their subscription model.

What benefits (if any) does the subscription offer?

	▲	simpsoka a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think they didn't intend for the bluetooth protocol to be reverse engineered. The free version of the software you really can't do much (limited colors, tools). I believe they also have some clip-art that they make available with the subscription. It's pretty bad.
	▲	tecleandor a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's maybe different business units. I have a couple industrial label printers from Brother, and although some of the software decisions are weird, there's no subscriptions or stuff like that.

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blacksmith_tb a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder if we might actually see an uptick in sales for hardware that has bad/abusive software out of the box... I hadn't really considered getting an embroidery machine, but now the idea actually seems sort of intriguing, esp. if it isn't locked to some terrible subscription. I doubt the manufacturers will connect the dots, but maybe if they ask Claude why sales are up...