I’m a design and fabrication STEM teacher for 7-12th grade. We laser cut and archive student work.
Following up on my previous post, I’m facing a critical issue that has escalated. Recently, Vectornator/Curve updated their monetization, making all files exclusive to their cloud servers. This change has severely impacted my students and me, as we are now limited to existing files and 3 file limit. We made due to try to survive until the end of the school year hobbling along on that limitation.
However as of today, you now locked all exporting or saving of files behind a paywall. We have hundreds of students with a year of work that is now locked behind a paywall. We can no longer export or save our work locally. Our own files, which were on our devices for years are now essentially ransomware on your severs.
As of my last outreach to support, we were quoted over $6,000 education pricing to use Curve for our middle school students to just finish up the school year.
Our school policy prohibits in-app purchases from students, so even if I had $6,000 lying around to pay off this extortion, our devices are locked from in-app purchases to even try the trial. And because Linearity took all our files and moved them behind the cloud, I can’t even access our data locally. You took their data off their iPads and removed all our local copies.
This move to cloud-only feels planned and no local storage means I cannot access or export SVG or PDF versions of any of their artwork. My students are heartbroken that their year of hard work is now locked behind a paywall.
I am horrified and appalled at the uncommunicative processes.
If anyone else has a possible solution, please let me know. Because right now I have nothing to grade for their final portfolios and many have end of year gifts they were trying to make for their favorite teachers or grandparents.
Since it’s not feasible to update the app public itself, is there a way to facilitate a one time download of all files manually from your support staff. I’m sure you save geo-location info as well, so they should be able to pull down the accounts that are within our school’s IP or geo location.
I can’t afford the $6,000+ for the student accounts for just 2-3 weeks of class to access their data.
Do you have any other solutions/ideas for this edge case?
Thank you for reaching out and sharing your situation with us. We genuinely understand the gravity of the issue you’re facing and the impact it’s having on your students.
We’ve received your direct message and replied to you. We’re looking forward to your response so we can discuss this individually and find a way to help you overcome this situation.
Our goal is to support educators and students. We hope to work together to find a solution as quickly as possible.