Why did a $14/month cloud STEP to STL service end up as a viewer?

Cloud conversion of a STEP file was sold by the month before it was given away. Four captures of the same domain — 25 April 2015, 31 August 2015, 1 February 2016 and 6 July 2022 — show a single paid plan turn into three tiers with a free entry, and then show the service disappear behind a viewer. Every figure below is read from those captures by the test suite or measured by this site, and every price carries its date.

The short answer

On 31 August 2015 the service charged $14/month for one Translate plan, with a free 7-day trial. By 1 February 2016 the same domain listed three tiers: Basic at $0, Pro at $19/month and OMNI at $39/month. The cheapest way in went from $14 a month to nothing in about five months — and the free tier was metered at 100 MB of uploads a month. By 6 July 2022 the domain served a viewer page: Windows, iOS, Android and AR downloads, no translate page and no price list at all.

So the price did not simply fall. It changed what was being sold: a monthly seat first, then a byte allowance, then a viewing app. The conversion itself — upload, run it on a server, download — is the thing that left. Prices here are 2015 and 2016 figures read from captures of a service that no longer sells this; they say nothing about what any tool costs today.

Four captures, one domain

What each capture contains. Dates and figures are the ones printed on the archived pages; the test suite reads the same files and checks the counts.
Capture date	What the page offered	Price on that page	What is missing
25 Apr 2015	A help page for the upload → server → download job: per-file ceiling, queue rule, trial terms	No figure on this page	No price list and no format table
31 Aug 2015	One Translate plan, three steps, six output formats, three input groups	$14/month, free 7-day trial	Only one plan; no free tier
1 Feb 2016	Three plans, a monthly upload allowance, the viewer named in the top tier	Basic $0, Pro $19/month, OMNI $39/month	No per-file ceiling on the price page
6 Jul 2022	Viewer downloads for Windows, iOS, Android and AR	No price at all	No translate page, no pricing page, no plan buttons

That last row is the honest negative this page is built on. The 2022 capture has nothing to price, so this page prints no 2022 figure — not zero, not “free”, nothing. A service that is not on the page cannot have a rate.

The price ladder: $14, then $0

The 2015 page is one sentence of commerce: a single plan, $14/month, a free 7-day trial, and a registration button. The 2016 page is a three-column layout. Basic is Free, described as free forever, with no credit card required and not a trial account. Pro is $19/month and raises the monthly upload allowance. OMNI is $39/month and bundles a desktop viewer with measuring, sectioning, comparison and export.

Two details make this a change of product rather than a discount. First, the trial disappears as the entry path: in 2015 you registered with a card and had seven days before it was charged; in 2016 the entry tier needed no card and never expired. Second, the paid tier stops being about conversion alone — the top one sells a desktop application by name. The ladder was rearranged around an app, not around the translate job.

The entry price fell to zero; the ladder grew. A single $14/month plan in August 2015 became $0 / $19 / $39 in February 2016. The dashed bar is the free tier: it costs nothing and it is capped, so it is a meter rather than a discount. The 2022 capture prints no price because it no longer sells the job.

The meter that replaced the price

The free tier was not unmetered. The 2016 page says Basic can upload up to 100 MB of 3D files every month, and Pro raises that to 1 GB a month. The 2015 help page used the same three characters for a different unit: you could upload a file up to 100 MB, per file. Same number, different clock — one caps a single upload, the other caps a month of uploads.

That is the part worth keeping, because it is the part a price list hides. When a server does the work, the bill is compute time and transfer, so the natural control is a quota per period. A free tier is not free to run; it is a volume that the vendor has decided to absorb. The customer sees “free”, and the product sees a meter.

100 MB, a queue and a seven-day trial

The 2015 help page answers the questions a queue creates. Files are queued and processed on a first come first serve basis, so a job can wait behind other people’s jobs. Typical translations finish in a couple of seconds, but the page blames size and other factors, and it warns that an upload can fail on a server timeout, so a good upload speed matters. Larger files should be zipped and tried again under the ceiling. Every plan starts with a 7-day trial before the card is charged, and a job that fails can be refunded after you write in.

None of that is strange for a service that runs the job elsewhere. It is the vocabulary of a shared machine: a ceiling, a queue, a timeout, a refund. The page on why converters asked for an upload owns the compute argument behind that setup; this page owns only what it cost and how the offer moved.

STEP went in, never out

The 2015 translate page lists its inputs in three groups — CAD, graphical, and neutral — and STEP sits in the third group, beside IGES, STL and a few legacy formats. The outputs are a different list entirely: 3D PDF, 3DS, COLLADA (DAE), OBJ, JT and STL, six formats, and STEP is not one of them. The service read solids and wrote meshes and documents.

So the direction was fixed before the price was set. A paid plan at $14 a month in 2015 bought exactly the direction this site runs for nothing: a solid in, a mesh out. The reverse job — a mesh back to an editable solid — was never on that price list, and the three-routes page covers what it costs today from three different sellers.

Where the service went

The 2022 capture has a viewer title, links to a Windows download, an iOS app, an Android app and an AR app, a product tour, and a contact page. It has no translate page, no pricing page and no plan buttons. The archive does not record a shutdown notice, and this page will not invent one: all it can say is that on 6 July 2022 the domain sold viewing, and the translation job that had a price list in 2016 was no longer on the page.

That is a normal ending for compute sold by the month. The mesh-era page covers what the same years could and could not convert; this page covers only the money and the disappearance.

The offer moved faster than the service. The entry price reached zero in about five months (31 August 2015 to 1 February 2016); the translate page was gone by 6 July 2022, about six years after the price list that mattered. The two changes did not happen at the same speed, and only the second one ended the service.

The cost structure now

The forward job can also run where the price list cannot be metered. This site ships the kernel as a 7,604,031-byte WebAssembly file and runs it in the tab, so there is no server bill per job, no queue to join, no refund to request and no account to create. That is not a claim to be cheaper than a 2015 company — there is nothing to compare, since it no longer sells the job — it is a different cost structure: the work happens on the machine that already owns the file.

The measured ends of the direction are the same ones every page on this site quotes. A flat 10 mm cube is 12 triangles and 684 bytes at every quality setting. An 18-part assembly of 433,606 bytes comes back as 7,372 triangles in a 368,684-byte STL at Normal. The file-size page covers what a monthly quota means for an upload service and what replaces it here.

What left was the bill, not the work. The 2015 side has a monthly price, a per-file ceiling and a queue because one server did every job; the tab side has none of those three because the work happens on the machine that owns the file. The 433,606-byte assembly → 7,372 triangles → 368,684 bytes figures are the same rows the no-CAD page measures, and the 7,604,031-byte kernel size is stat’d by npm test.

Questions this page answers

What did the service cost in 2015?

The capture dated 31 August 2015 prices a single Translate plan at $14/month with a free 7-day trial. That is a 2015 figure printed on a page that no longer sells this service; it is not today's price for anything, and this page does not convert it into one.

What changed by February 2016?

By the capture dated 1 February 2016 the single plan had become three tiers: Basic at $0, Pro at $19/month and OMNI at $39/month. The entry price moved from $14 a month to nothing in about five months, but the free tier was metered at 100 MB of uploads every month, where the 2015 FAQ put its 100 MB limit on a single file.

Where did the conversion service go?

The capture dated 6 July 2022 is a viewer page: it offers Windows, iOS, Android and AR viewers to download and carries no translate page, no pricing page and no plan buttons. The cloud translation business had become a viewer app, and the price list this page quotes survives only in captures.

Does this site sell conversions the way that service did?

No. The converter here reads STEP and IGES and writes STL, one direction only, in millimetres with the axes unchanged, and it has no account, no plan, no monthly quota and no queue. Nothing here charges per file, and nothing here accepts an STL as input.

Where these numbers come from

$14/month, free 7-day trial, six output formats, STEP in the input list only — a Wayback Machine capture dated 31 August 2015, kept in this project’s research folder as babel3d-translate-20150831.html. The test suite reads that file directly, counts the output formats and requires this page to print the same count and the same price.
Basic $0, Pro $19/month, OMNI $39/month, 100 MB a month on Basic, 1 GB a month on Pro — the capture dated 1 February 2016, kept as babel3d-pricing-20160201.html. The plan names and the three figures are printed on that page; the monthly allowance wording is quoted, not paraphrased.
100 MB per file, first come first serve, 7-day trial on every plan, refund after a failed job — the capture dated 25 April 2015, kept as babel3d-faq-20150425.html.
6 July 2022, viewer only, no translate page and no pricing page — the capture dated 6 July 2022, kept as babel3d-index-20220706.html. The test suite checks that the translate and pricing links are absent from that file.
7,604,031 bytes, 12 triangles / 684 bytes, 433,606 bytes → 7,372 triangles → 368,684 bytes — the kernel file’s length on disk and this project’s own measured conversions, re-run by npm test on every release. They describe the forward direction only.
What this page does not print — no monthly search volume, no keyword bid, no current price for any tool, and no shutdown date that the captures do not show. Every figure is dated, and the verification page owns the format rejection list; this page links to it rather than repeating it.

npm test

The command above re-runs every number this project measured. The compute-history page owns why the job went to a server, the mesh-era page owns which formats those years could convert, and the converter is where a STEP file meets the kernel, in the tab.