John, do you have local retailer/distributors in your supply chain or are you selling direct through the website? How soon can we see pricing which includes delivery (and conversion for us outside of the US )?

decent_espresso wrote:The paddle feature is a projected future accessory, but I don't know when it will ship, as it is currently being worked on as a lower priority and it's not on our release calendar yet.

Currently, we're projecting an August 2016 ship date for two models, a DE1 ($999) and a DE1PRO ($3999).
...so I'll try to be as fair as I can be!

Thanks for the great reply and information on the pro model and taste and functionality differences you've noticed compared with your GS3. I know those were some difficult (loaded?) questions I was asking.

Can you post the pressure profiles you will have on the stock DE1, or are you still finalizing them?

Fausto wrote:$4k is not what I expected. a price increase seems reasonable, but that's a lot of money!

Several people have commented that you wont draw GS3/Slayer/Synesso crowds with your $1K machine. I and others made a point that quality and performance certainly might and should. This price point for the Pro model does not surprise me if one looks at the price of a Vesuvius, gs3, slayer etc. Nonetheless I too agree that this is heartbreaking.

day wrote:Just for the record, this will go down in HB history as one of the most heartbreaking moments in a thread ever

decent_espresso wrote:
This is the first post I've made describing the DE1PRO. We previously were holding back on these features because they seemed too "edgy" for a home audience, and more "coffee experimenter". My experience is that the DE1 will deliver shots at least equivalent in quality to the GS/3, whereas the DE1PRO is aimed at a much smaller, tinkerer market.

Many people on HB purchase commercial machines and I would even state that we are more likely to be tinkerers compared with a commercial setting where a barista would not have time to make multiple changes and play with different functions or change beans frequently enough to try out different profiles. I presumed your target audience was the home barista actually.

All quite exciting stuff and eagerly awaiting the final product and in the cup reviews. Ill happily join the ranks of a beta tester

decent_espresso wrote:I just dug up the brochure you probably saw from a year ago, as I think we met at Coffee Fest in Portland (is that right?)

Yes, that's right. We spoke briefly and Ray demoed the prototype with a Scace device. It was great.

decent_espresso wrote: We're still delivering on our promise of a $999 machine with excellent temperature accuracy, pressure profiling and other higher end qualities (preheated group head, VST-equivalent basket, stainless steel bottomless portafilter). I like to think that is still delivering good value.

I think the DE1 is fantastically priced - As you continue to pile on the features I'm probably going to turn my concern to long term reliability/repairability. Until you came along the BDB was similarly positioned - an extremely capable machine at an unbelievable price. Since then many BDB's have died - but luckily for consumers Breville has gone above and beyond their warranty obligations and kept customers happy. I'm sure you're confident that these are going to hold up, but when suddenly thousands of machines are out in the wild getting used and abused who knows what's going to happen. I'm definitely optimistic, but $4000 is asking a lot of trust from a young company.

Edit: Are we signing up to be beta testers now (probably not), I'm definitely interested!

mauijer wrote: Several people have commented that you wont draw GS3/Slayer/Synesso crowds with your $1K machine. I and others made a point that quality and performance certainly might and should. This price point for the Pro model does not surprise me if one looks at the price of a Vesuvius, gs3, slayer etc. Nonetheless I too agree that this is heartbreaking.

I wonder, will the $4k DE1 pro have multiple thermoblocks to allow for simultaneous brewing/steaming? If not, it's comparing apples to oranges.

decent_espresso wrote: Currently, we're projecting an August 2016 ship date for two models, a DE1 ($999) and a DE1PRO ($3999).

The DE1 has:

• * excellent temperature accuracy (worst case of +/- 1.0C)
  * pressure profiling: choose one of 12 pre-set profiles
  * charts that show you temperature, flow and pressure in real time, and also point out technique problems that caused a bad coffee
  * a simple "tap the icon to make this" interface
  * water temp settable between 80C and 99C
  * precise control over the temperature of the hot water tap
  * control over the steam temperature
  * very high quality portafilter basket (equivalent to VST quality)
  * 110V/220V

This puts to rest my shopping dilemma of BDB or e61 Hx machine. A DE1 will be on my countertop the first week it is available! Can't wait.

caldwa wrote:I wonder, will the $4k DE1 pro have multiple thermoblocks to allow for simultaneous brewing/steaming? If not, it's comparing apples to oranges.

Agreed; I was just making a point about high end features and price point. The Vesuvius with pressure profiling would probably be the closest comparison. However, the difference in technology with the DE1 is inherently an apples to oranges comparison with any current machine. I would assume that the Pro model would need a sexy exterior and be capable of simultaneous brew/steam to be competitive at that price point; unless, of course the target audience really is just going to be research/lab.

Spitz.me wrote:John, do you have local retailer/distributors in your supply chain or are you selling direct through the website?

We are only selling direct. As many people predicted, the DE1 is a lot more expensive to make than the competition (about 3x more) and there is no margin in our business plan to give 40% commissions to middlemen.

Like the rest of the HBers, I too am very concerned about service and support, which is another reason I want to sell direct. If you have any problems, I want you to have a direct line with us, so we can fix the problem. My experience is that middlemen like to make margin from moving boxes, but usually get in the way when there's a problem.

Luckily, shipping things back to Hong Kong is almost free (USD$200 to fill a container from Los Angeles to HK), so our plan is if your machine breaks, you send it to our depot in your country, and we send you a new machine from HK. We'll eventually ship those broken machines slowly back to us, repair them and sell them at a discount as refurbished units.

Spitz.me wrote:How soon can we see pricing which includes delivery (and conversion for us outside of the US )?

I've just signed a contract with our fulfilment house (that's a company that does shipping and customs clearance). As to shipping, you're looking at somewhere between USD$100 and USD$250 to ship our machine to you, depending on how fast you want it (15 to 20 days for the cheaper, 3-5 days for the expensive option).

For 220V/240V countries, the price is expected to be about 30% higher for the DE1, because we're putting heavier duty components into it. Some countries, like the EU, also have import duties that need to be accounted for.

mauijer wrote:Can you post the pressure profiles you will have on the stock DE1, or are you still finalizing them?

We haven't decided on them at all, and I'm happy to discuss what we should have, on HB. I was thinking of having plenty of flat-pressure profiles, say at 4bar, 6bar, 8.2bar, 8.4bar, 9.0bar, 9.2bar, as well as profiles that imitate the stock profiles of New Simonini, Slayer and Synesso.

I run a private discussion group with 23 competition baristas, which includes two world champions, and I expect that some of our profiles will emerge from them.

We won't have it at shipping time, but my intention is for people with the DE1PRO to be able to make their own profiles, save and share them via our cloud service, and for people with the DE1 to then be able to download those profiles and use them. I wasn't foreseeing artificially limiting the number of profiles on the DE1 to some arbitrary number. At launch there'll be some set number, but as we push out software updates, this will number will increase until sharing is possible.

Spitz.me wrote:Several people have commented that you wont draw GS3/Slayer/Synesso crowds with your $1K machine. I and others made a point that quality and performance certainly might and should. This price point for the Pro model does not surprise me if one looks at the price of a Vesuvius, gs3, slayer etc.

My GS/3 cost me €7000, while a Slayer one group machine is USD$8500 (https://prima-coffee.com/equipment/slayer/single-group).

The DE1PRO is less than half the price of those machines, and except for our lower steam production than a traditional boiler machine, I believe it matches all their capabilities and has a half dozen other capabilities that they don't have. If you buy our 220V machine, I think we'll be close to matching their steam production too.

Spitz.me wrote:Many people on HB purchase commercial machines and I would even state that we are more likely to be tinkerers compared with a commercial setting where a barista would not have time to make multiple changes and play with different functions or change beans frequently enough to try out different profiles. I presumed your target audience was the home barista actually.

You're right, that's my background, and that is the target audience. However, nobody would win if we tried to sell the DE1PRO at $999 and subsequently went out of business. It's just too expensive a machine to build (and to have developed: R&D is not cheap) to sell at a BDB price.

Fausto wrote:As you continue to pile on the features I'm probably going to turn my concern to long term reliability/repairability. Until you came along the BDB was similarly positioned - an extremely capable machine at an unbelievable price. Since then many BDB's have died - but luckily for consumers Breville has gone above and beyond their warranty obligations and kept customers happy. I'm sure you're confident that these are going to hold up, but when suddenly thousands of machines are out in the wild getting used and abused who knows what's going to happen. I'm definitely optimistic, but $4000 is asking a lot of trust from a young company.

Of course we're going to do our best to make our machines hold up. The 3 of us engineers here are in our 40s, and have shipped a lot of new products, so we do have long term experience with this. I previously built and ran a company that grew to 50 employees, thousands of customers, and which ran the email newsletters for 3 US presidential election campaigns: this would have been unlikely to happen with bad customer service.

As a new company, I expect that no matter how great our machine, if it fails in the field and we don't deliver a good service experience, that we won't succeed as a company.

I answered, at the top of this message, how we're planning on supporting our machines. We'll also be selling all parts to anyone who wants to buy them, not just to technicians, in case you want to stockpile parts as a hedge against our longevity.

caldwa wrote:I wonder, will the $4k DE1 pro have multiple thermoblocks to allow for simultaneous brewing/steaming? If not, it's comparing apples to oranges.

Yes, both the DE1 and the DE1PRO have two water heaters, one for brew and one for steam. Both heaters are used for steam production, but the steam heater is a custom design to prevent "wet steam" from coming out the wand.

mauijer wrote:Agreed; I was just making a point about high end features and price point. The Vesuvius with pressure profiling would probably be the closest comparison. However, the difference in technology with the DE1 is inherently an apples to oranges comparison with any current machine. I would assume that the Pro model would need a sexy exterior and be capable of simultaneous brew/steam to be competitive at that price point; unless, of course the target audience really is just going to be research/lab.

Simultaneous Brew/Steam for us, is simply a matter of electrical juice available. At 220V/240V, we can absolutely do it, and we probably (not sure yet) can do it at 20A/110V. Not at 110V/15A, though.

Water heating once the shot is at full pressure takes much less electricity (because of the lower water flow), so we're also exploring the possibility of simultaneous brew/steam at about 10 seconds into the shot. That's nearly instantaneous, and might satisfy many people's needs for steaming milk while the shot finishes. This is still to be researched.

mauijer wrote:I would assume that the Pro model would need a sexy exterior

I agree.
Considering all the features, I don't mind the $4k price tag but the pro machine is going to need an upgraded exterior for me to be seriously interested and to get SO approval.

Very interesting Thread!

arcus wrote:I agree.
Considering all the features, I don't mind the $4k price tag but the pro machine is going to need an upgraded exterior for me to be seriously interested and to get SO approval.

Add me to that agree list.