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Oh, AutoDesk...you have such a way with words. Honestly, I would rather learn to design in OpenSCAD than send AutoDesk a single penny.
I greatly miss the ability to simply purchase a program on a disk for a given year and just have access to that tool.
otoh you have stuff like FreeCAD or OpenSCAD completely free and usable AND you could modify it as you please.
Back then FOSS CAD was barely usable.
I think the thing people wish for was a little bit of polish in their open source tools.
I love kicad, but it used to have some really rough edges in spite of being simpler compared to something like Altium.
I’ve used FreeCAD for a few months for small/medium-sized projects and it crashes way too often. It’s pretty much unusable for me. I only use it for CAM these days and do my CAD with OnShape.
I'm learning freecad now and can verify the crashiness, so far I've been learning the tools to avoid and having some luck
Freecad is... rough. But, it has python API, and that's what I ended up using for almost all my stuff (there also was a period of using cadquery, but installing it is a horrible pain, so I gve up).
Also using onshape every now and then, but many things are just too annoying to do with a gui.
So if you have $1001 in annual revenue, you have to pay $680? So if your business has a running cost of %50, you need to go into the red by $180 to continue running your business?
Someone over in marketing is an idiot.
When I was working as an engineer I used both autocad and revit, autodesk has been a piece of shit company for a long, long time. Their greed knows no limits and unfortunately they have convinced their markets that the cost of working with them is just "the cost of doing business".
I'd love to see the day they crash and burn as a company, but I have a feeling that's just a far fetched dream.
You could replace Autodeak with Adobe in your post and it'd be exactly the same. These companies are pieces of shit.
I mean you could always switch to Bentley. AFAICT, they’re actually more Byzantine in their licensing structure, though. They bought a small analysis program company I used and their support was so terrible I gave up and learned a whole new FEM program rather than continue.
They know that they are still cheaper than any of the other commercial packages. SolidWorks' yearly maintenance (plus you have a higher upfront cost when you acquire it) is multiple times the F360 subscription per seat.
They aren't interested in dealing with low value business, the only reason they even have a free version is to get potential future customers used to the software so they demand their employers buy it over their competitors. Same reason why Dassault Systemes gives SolidWorks to students for free.
Nobody making $1000 in revenue is buying it, but yes that's what they're saying. However, that'd be a business expense and you'd get to deduct taxes for it. Still not amazing but yeah.
You’d not really be getting that much back from a deduction. You’d need over 68% of your revenue to be taxed before it would even start to matter at lower revenue amounts.
I agree it's a silly breakpoint, but they have to draw the line somewhere, and I'm sure they feel that a 70/30 split is completely reasonable. Besides, a Fusion license is practically coins-in-the-couch compared to their architectural licensing fees. I'm sure they feel like they're doing us a favor by pricing Fusion so low.
It’s just so weird to go from “free for personal and low Commercial use”, up to “we want 68% of your revenue.”
They could easily have made it a sliding scale, or gone with profit instead of revenue.
The thing is that pretty much nobody is making over 1k and less than 10-20k a year with fusion.
Like others have said, Autodesk is a piece of shit company that continues to be customer hostile. They pulled the rug out from underneath users years ago with F360.
FreeCAD is a good alternative. A lot of people complain about the UI polish, and complain that models break. I'll admit that the UI isn't as polished as commercial software like F360 or SolidWorks. However, it's just as easy to break models in SolidWorks as it is in FreeCAD. I've been using 3D CAD for over 20 years, and it's always been a problem. Even with all of my experience, I still have to fix references that get broken as I make design changes. The more you use 3D CAD, the less you run into situations like this because you're able to think ahead and avoid them. Talk to any experienced CAD user and they'll tell you the same thing.
The workflows of FreeCAD are just like commercial software for most functions. There are definitely features that commercial software has that FreeCAD doesn't, but that's where you have to make the judgement about whether it's worth it to pay for it.
For me, I'll continue to use FreeCAD for my personal projects. I use SolidWorks at work, but we have different demands there, and it's worth the company paying the maintenance for it.
Just so nobody fires up freecad thinking they're about to get a commercial experience:
FreeCAD sucks. It works. But it sucks. There's basically no community. Development is fractured and slow. Some workflows that are trivial in solid works are tedious in freecad.
But it works. And it's foss. If you need something that runs on Linux, it's the way to go.
I use FreeCAD exclusively, and while it does have several aspects about it that still suck, I have to say that it's has improved dramatically by the current release (0.21.1, I think) versus when I started using it which was around 0.18.
I have definitely found the workflow for certain operations to be a bit obtuse, but I've never actually had it been unable to do whatever I was trying to accomplish, ultimately, somehow in some way.
I'll take FreeCAD's quirks and foibles over any type of predatory subscription, licensing, or cloud only bullshit AutoDesk or Solidworks or whoever the hell else is up to. Any day, any time.
I also started using it around that time. And I agree with everything you said except the part where said it's improved dramatically. It's improved, yes, but I would call those improvements minimal, not dramatic, especially considering it's taken five years to accomplish them.
Disagree. I thought freecad was awesome. But I didn't use it professionally...just as a hobbyist teaching myself cad.
The most frustrating thing for me was the changes between versions and finding the right tutorial to match your version was frustrating.
It's the equivalent of gimp vs Photoshop.
Onshape is another alternative. Even runs on Linux too!
While you are not wrong, I personally wouldn't consider it unless there was a "buy it for a fixed price option". Subscription only unless it's for personal use. Oh and it is Cloud only
I just got this mail. They are very funny. It is clear that they are trying to generate money by adding features, but the whole point is that I don't need more features.
I just need the program as it is, hell, they can still take more functionality away and it will still work for me just fine. I just use it for small projects, maybe twice a year.
If the free version ever goes away, I'll just learn some other program. There might be a learning curve, but I don't mind.
And I understand that they need to make money, and they have every right to charge whatever they want. But mails like this make them look desperate for cash.
If they really don't want too, don't have a free product. Then everybody knows what is up.
FreeCad is petty epic for home projects. It took me about a month to transition from SolidWorks but now I'm a big fan
What we need is Blender with a timeline! Blender is fantastic, I really hope someone adds a timeline.
I have designed a lot of things in Blender but after using fusion the dam timeline made me a fusion junkie.
I love blender, but blender isn't CAD. Adding a timeline wouldn't make it CAD.
We need something like Affinity for CAD. Surely it must be possible to make a CAD program that can do the basics you need for 3D printing without all the advanced simulations and analysis. I just want to draw some sketches and extrude them.
FreeCAD. I'm not sure why more people aren't using tbh.
Every time I've used FreeCAD it felt miserable to use. Idk if I was doing something wrong, but it felt horrendous
I've used it for the past year, and no - you aren't doing anything wrong. Had the same experience, and the privilege to compare it to Solidworks. There is no contest, other than price ofc
IMHO its because the software lack a lot of polish. At times i found FreeCAD is better that fusion. But for the amount of pain it takes to get the software to work, it makes me want to look elsewhere.
But man are the tools in freecad good, when they work. Just wish it was multithreaded
OpenCAD. But it's like Photoshop vs Gimp. But also with a bigger learning curve.
Gimp I got the hang of pretty quickly coming from Photoshop, but switching to OpenCAD has not been a smooth transition from AutoCAD.
Solvespace might be exactly what you're looking for. It is FOSS and works well for simple models. Some functionality is missing though, for example chamfers and fillets.
The price is always whatever they think you are willing to pay. Especially for software where their cost is entirely development and the marginal cost is zero.
In other news, war is still peace and slavery is still freedom.
I recently made the switch to Linux, and since fusion360 doesn't support Linux I've been using Onshape. Boy do I miss fusion. I certainly wouldn't pay $600 a year for it though since I only use it for personal projects.
Getting fusion360 running on linux is 10 seconds of google. It works perfectly fine and i use it for without any hiccups.
Method 1: Get Bottles and use the provided installer inside that.
Method 2: Use this script
This isn't the personal use version. That one is still free.
My last couple of parts I designed in Designspark Mechanical, which I gather is a nerfed Spaceclaim. Closedf source and Windows only, and I guess that they've been pissing off their users too, but by removing features rather than trying to directly extort money. The reason I went with it though, is because despite being full of its own issues, it still allows commercial use with the free subscription/download.
The most likely scenario is that I never make a single dollar from my hobbies, but it's nice that if I were to somehow stumble into something that a few people wanted to pay for, I wouldn't owe Autodesk any money. The direct modeling also makes sense for my TinkerCAD/woodworking brain. I have tried FreeCAD and found the learning curve daunting.