I funded Lupe on Kickstarter. The campaign was plagued with delays (like most campaigns), but the communication was good throughout and the campaign was well-run. It took a long time for my Lupe to arrive, but it was worth the wait. Great unboxing experience. Very easy to assemble, everything feels very premium and well engineered. Build quality seems good, it feels like it's built to last. Feels like such a luxury to have a removable battery and be able to charge it anywhere. It's not that loud - on full power there is definitely a high pitched whine, but it's neither particularly loud nor annoying. It's about the same volume as our old Hoover vacuum (maybe a little quieter, just higher-pitched), but delivers FAR better performance. Honestly, it's not even a contest. The suction on this thing is no joke. Our previous Hoover vacuum needed multiple passes to pick stuff up and would get filled up and blocked very quickly. For the Lupe, even on eco mode, it's child's play. Picks it up straight away - Even though the suction is strong, it's still easy to use and very easy to steer around thanks to the clever handle design. It picks up dog hair, long human hair, and yarn fibre like it's nothing. The amount of dust that I've emptied out of the bin so far is insane, just from a quick pass over the living room. Honestly, it's pretty amazing to think all that dust was lurking there in the carpet. The best part is, even when the Lupe's dust bin is pretty much full, you're still getting ridiculous suction power. You save so much time because you usually only have to go over an area once. The dust bin is easy to empty, though it's a bit annoying that you have to remove the filter assembly to get rid of the dust at the top of the bin. However, it's not a major inconvenience and from the way it's designed it looks like it would have been difficult to make it any other way. This is more of a "manual isn't explicit enough about this feature" problem, rather than a design issue. Now onto the less good. The self-standing feature where you disconnect the hose and use an attachment is OK. The biggest flaw of the Lupe is that the hose is not particularly long, so you need to be careful of the Lupe falling over when using it in standing mode, but also it's hard to reach high ceilings. The battery life is OK, it's fine for us but we live in a smallish 2 bedroom house. The hose issue and the included attachments mean it's not a great option for stairs. This really seems to be the only area where I feel a little let down. However, the overall performance of the Lupe is so good that the hose and stairs issues feel very minor. Happy with my purchase, and my mother has already purchased a Lupe after I told her how good it was. She has the exact same minor complaints about the short length of the hose and its relatively poor performance on stairs, but overall she also loves it. Definitely worth the money and the wait!