Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Upon receipt of this item several months ago I rated it a 4, particularly based on how novel the concept was to me of an affordable machine with some basic functionality I was just learning. However, I am downgrading my review after months of experience and hope this review will help persuade you to purchase an alternate item (i.e. a Sillhouette). 1) Horrid interface. To use this product you must use a program from Cricut called Design Space (you do not need to design in DS, but you do need to use DS to get the Cricut to cut). I've had to call customer service repeatedly because DS often will not load at all. When it does load, it takes a painful long time to perform any basic function (like load a simple font; I'm not exaggerating that to change a font in my work from one to another takes 45 seconds, which is maddening when trying to choose from dozens of fonts). I've had several projects fully designed that the machine would then fail to read, and you realize that the platform didn't save changes, thus wasting 100% of your time and forcing you to completely start the design over. After working a few projects you realize that on average I spend 1 hour in DS for each project that should take only 15 minutes due to the horrors with this program. You can do a quick Google search on the topic and instantly see where crafters are beyond frustrated with the inefficiencies caused by the program. It sucks the joy out of crafting. 2) Customer service is lacking. If you have an issue (like the software not loading), you can call or web chat with customer service. Sometimes you are lucky and get a live person in under an hour and they are helpful. Most of the time you wait on hold forever and hang up on frustration, or chat with someone who doesn't know how to solve your problem at all. I've had half a dozen nights in the last few months where I wanted to work a project but couldn't because the DS program/Cricut servers were not working and Cricut customer support was, well, not supporting. Again, waste of time, and my craft night was ruined. Remember what I said about the joy being sucked out of crafting? 3) The most problematic issue with Cricut is their blatant lack of care for their customer. The above-listed problems are issues on their own, but are compounded by the lack of social media ethics at Cricut. When all else fails at trying to resolve a problem, I tend to go to a company's social media. However, Cricut does not allow posts to their social media by "fans" on Facebook without their strict and questionable moderation. Therefore if you go to their official page and look at fan posts, you'll see only a handful of positive posts. Zero criticism (even the GREATEST companies get criticism, so you will know the posts you see on their FB page are moderated at first glance as you will only see positive, happy posts - can you say misleading?!). That's because if you post saying, "DS is not working again tonight and customer service has no solution. When will a fix be implemented?" the moderator will not approve your post. I acknowledge that moderating and deleting are different, but deleting they also do (shame on them!). For example, Cricut recently posted on their Facebook page a contest for ugly Christmas sweaters. I thought it was a fun idea, and designed my sweater concept in DS. After about an hour of design (it shouldn't have taken so long, but the fonts would not load), I tried to send my design to the machine to cut, but the machine would not read. I tried to save the project, but it would not let me. So on the Facebook contest post I wrote a reply that I would love to enter the contest but DS is again not working and I wasted time designing a project that could not be completed. There was another woman who had posted the same feedback. Both of our posts were respectful (they provided negative feedback in a polite way). To my dismay, not only was my comment and the other woman's comment DELETED by Cricut the next day, but the company also blocked me from being able to post on their page (either a direct post or a reply to any post). All the other issues I've had with Cricut can be ignored, but the unethical social media approach is why I will never spend dollars on Cricut products again. I believe that deleting honest (polite) feedback is a critical deal breaker when I work with any company. This approach proves that the company's only goal is to make money, sell product, and hopefully trick potential new customers into believing that the company receives only positive social media posts. This also reinforces to me that Cricut has no desire to improve the (significant) flaws in their products and systems, since any constructive criticism is immediately deleted to make it look like Cricut is operationally flawless. Unacceptable. 4) Cricut heavily pushes a subscription service. I paid in for a few months but realized the value completely lacks. The 25K+ images available are of the quality one can find online for free. If it were convenient to use DS maybe having embedded images would be valuable, but I think this is just another money-making scheme by this company. 5) if you can get through all the issues listed above, Cricut has precise cutting. You know, if you can get DS to actually work so that you can cut something. In summary, please don't talk yourself into buying a Cricut based on the promise of what it should execute. Likely your expectations will not be met. I hope you, too, will avoid having the joy of crafting sucked out of you by this company.