I rarely use my Go Baby (manual) but then I don't have too many dies for it. To make it a useful tool, you need to invest in many more dies, each at a high cost. I did make a Hunter's Star quilt and having the dies made it much easier to cut everything accurately. My objection to the whole process is that you are limited by the sizes of dies you own, so you need to keep buying new dies. I just got a strip cutting template that I think will be much more useful in the long run and it only cost $10 (used) versus the $139 or so you'd spend for dies for specific widths. An electric cutter makes more sense to me except that I can put my light manual machine away when I'm not using it.