Ultimately the high price wasn't what held me back from joining, but the tool use policies required by their insurers. You had to pay for a brutally waitlisted class before they'd let you use so much as a laser cutter. I wonder how much this contributed - both the cost of insurance and its consequences - to their decline.
For better or worse, that's been the model at every makerspace I've been a member of/looked into. And I think it makes sense, insurance-mandated or not. Lots of expensive, potentially dangerous machinery that if used wrong can destroy itself, its user, and/or those nearby.
Also, in my experience once you've built up enough trust with the admins they'll let you get a crash course from a member who knows what's up and skip the fees and formal training process.
I don't want to be around people who use powerful machines without proper training, or around kids using those machines, or using those machines around kids who treat the shop as a playground.
Definitely the biggest hazard in my comprehensive school tech. classes. Little makes you move to the other side of the room faster than people throwing random pieces of scrap at a powered disk sander, and I'll never forgot the noise an LED makes when shorted across a 230VAC wall socket (with a locker key jammed in the earth pin for good measure...).
I sometimes wonder how the only injuries I got from those years was a minor soldering burn (dropped the iron) and accidentally impaling the palm of my hand with a screwdriver.
Well, the woodshop itself had equipment that was decades old; some of the equipment was quality stuff dating from the 1930s. We had this huge surface planer machine that could take wood 6 inches thick and 8 feet wide; it took a good 10 minutes for it to come to a complete stop after powering it up.
A friend of mine wanted to see if it would plane 1/2" in one pass off a 2x6; the instructor of the class had no problem with trying it, either!
It did. You wouldn't believe the sound it made, but it didn't miss a beat doing it.
Given that this was about a waitlist for the "how to use a laser cutter" class, getting another tool probably wasn't going to be economically possible.
The TechShop in my area (Phoenix/Chandler) had six (!) laser cutters - all ULS 60 watt machines (I'm not sure what they had before they closed; I haven't been back in a long while). ULS is based in Scottsdale, so maybe they got a discount on the equipment or something - but regardless, those machines aren't cheap. They are quality machines (heck, the software alone is pretty amazing), and have a cost that reflects it.
if you add up all the fees, assuming you have a big enough space, instead you can buy a lot of that gear used or on the low end. have a blast learning. keep your work and stock next to your tools, and specialize in the processes that interest you.
the only exception i can think of is the sheet metal tools, they need quite a bit of floor space and are shockingly expensive. i don't think tech shop had a water jet, but that too would be worth paying for time on.
The SF TechShop did have a waterjet, capable of cutting through basically anything.
0x10, "Data Link Escape"? How did that get there, I'm really curious.
(industrial space in the bayview has gone up, but its still under $1/ft)
The bigger problem for me was that equipment was under some contention, meaning that it took signing up for a particular (maybe 2 hour) block of time a couple days in advance. I was trying to prototype things and learn basic stuff at the same time, which meant that my original computer designs were typically wrong the first few tries, and I wanted to do several rounds of iterative improvements to my designs. That is: 10 minutes of cutting, followed by 30 minutes of fiddling with a computer program or vector file, followed by 10 more minutes of cutting, etc. With a 2 hour block of time it’s only possible to get through 3 feedback cycles in that style, after which I sometimes had to wait a few days to try again at a time that would fit in my schedule. I would have been dramatically more efficient if I could have shared a 6 hour block of time with 3–4 other people.