I'm kind of sick of companies punishing personal/hobby/learning users because another group that should be paying for their software isn't doing it.

This is their problem to solve, and they have chosen to do it this way.

I regret spending effort in learning how to use this platform. I am removing all my public Fusion360 designs and tutorials and replacing them with recommendations to others to avoid their software.

Original: Anyone looking to learn CAD probably ought to just jump right to solidworks as a vendor that is at the very least more predictable and has better return on your time.

Revision: May have spoken too soon Re: solidworks. sigh I gues if you are a great software engineer with some free time, have a look at FreeCAD. It needs some good help.

While I agree, I have a somewhat different take. I'm sick of companies building their products off the backs of the personal/hobbiest/small business market, and then when they get enough recognition and buzz, switch to essentially an "enterprise-only" pricing structure, completely screwing over the users who made them successful in the first place.

I have no problem that companies (obviously) need to monetize, but when you dump customers the second it becomes more convenient it means that I'll be extremely wary to consider you when it comes to purchasing software for my enterprise.

Anyone that pushes for anti-GPL licenses only get what they deserve.

Want my work for free? GPL is the only license I will ever use.

> I'm sick of companies building their products off the backs of the personal/hobbiest/small business market, and then when they get enough recognition and buzz, switch to essentially an "enterprise-only" pricing structure, completely screwing over the users who made them successful in the first place.

Then stop supporting them.

This isn't hard. There are alternatives. They need users. They need programmers. They need money. They need tutorials.

Support the open alternative even when it is inferior or keep getting screwed.

I think the average user of Autodesk does not frequent this forum, and probably has no idea what 'open alternative' really means. And no, there are not alternatives for most workloads supported by Autodesk applications. These people are professionals (tutorials are the last thing they need, they learn the software in school) that need to work, they need professional support and they need it now, there are no alternatives at all, aside from Solidworks that's limited to a few domains.

Autodesk is about the last company that builds software on the backs of personal/hobbyists/small business market. Not choosing Autodesk is a career ending mistake in many cases, too.

Fair, I honestly was thinking about the history of Optimizely which popped up on HN recently when they were acquired.

This doesn’t seem “enterprise-only” to me. It’s $60 a month. That’s a lot cheaper than even one employee, something that any small business or solo professional should be able to handle.

> I'm sick of companies building their products off the backs of the personal/hobbiest/small business market, and then when they get enough recognition and buzz, switch to essentially an "enterprise-only" pricing structure, completely screwing over the users who made them successful in the first place.

As someone said on the Internet, what you are sick of is capitalism. Because that is how basically business work. You get a customer base, but as your company grows you leave the less profitable customers behind. And, it makes a lot of economic sense.

As, I think that capitalism works. Maybe the solution is to remove part of the software from the market. Many institutions (schools, universities, or even the military) could spend resources on creating the tools that their students, and society as a whole can use. The goal would be more aligned with citizens needs instead of maximizing profit.

At the same time, companies can still capitalize on the different needs of the enterprise software. So, business continuation is assured.

Our current problem is that almost all platforms are designed for profit but platforms, by definition, are foundations. And that foundations not only are used for businesses but also for society.

It is the equivalent of a country were all streets and roads are private. And, the owners can decide who passes or not by their streets, and how much they pay. That is extremely good for businesses, not so good to grow an economy or a free society.

Capitalism is fine. FLOSS software is also part of a capitalist market after all, especially via crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Patreon etc. Mostly, what we need is more real competition and less focus on monopoly platforms as the only kind of "success" in this market.

> Mostly, what we need is more real competition and less focus on monopoly platforms as the only kind of "success" in this market.

Platforms are inherently monopolistic. Network effect is key.

The most popular platforms have more users that provide support, because most support for software is done for free by experts in their spare time.

The most popular platforms also are more in demand for jobs. So, future practitioners learn the most on demand platforms increasing the number of users of that platform.

And the point of the parent comment, once a small platform becomes popular it abandons its small users to move to the more profitable enterprise layer leaving many people without access to the tool that they have spend time promoting, learning and supporting.

It does not work.

> Platforms are inherently monopolistic. Network effect is key.

Not so. Federated and decentralized platforms do not involve any monopoly.

Solidworks parent company just did the same thing with their 2D Autocad alternative DraftSight.

Used to be free, now it's not. Dassault/Solidworks are no better.

Support free/open projects like FreeCAD and let's boost it to Blender levels of incredible.

Alternatively, try FreeCAD. It's an amazingly capable software, and you don't have to fear it will one day be bought by autodesk and ruined.

Why freecad over openscad? (Im Still new to the scene)

InOpenScad you cannot edit models via mouse. You write scripts that look like this:

    // Outer box depth
    boxDepth = 60;
    // Lid height
    lidHeight = 10;
    module closeTab() {
        translate([-5, boxDepth/2+1, lidHeight-5]) {
        rotate(a=[180, 0, 0]) rotate(a=[0, 90, 0]) linear_extrude(height=10) polygon(points=[[10, -1], [9, 2.5], [8, 2.5], [7.5, 1], [-1, 1], [3, -1]]);
        }
    }

OpenSCAD itself just visualizes these and allows you to easily set parameters via a GUI. IMO this approach does not work for more complex models, makes small iterations much much slower. The difference between F360 and OpenSCAD is huge, its like comparing Paint to Photoshop.

Is there a way to use openscad in a higher level manner? My ventures into it (very brief) leads me to believe it is very coordinate based. The tutorial for example:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_Tutorial/Chapter_1

...that seems like a low-level way to describe relations between the primitives. It reminds me of the coordinate virus:

http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/MathViruses.pdf

...hope that doesn't seem too negative. To put it another way, openscad seems like the C of geometric modeling, lowish level, procedural. Is there a Prolog or Haskell of 3D modeling?

You parameterize everything and use a hierarchy of modules. Then high level changes flow down through the hierarchy.

OpenSCAD is the Prolog of 3D. It only looks C-ish but it isn't actually imperative which burns some people thinking that variable assignments are sequential.

Do you know of a good example showcasing openscad's higher order features?

I am a passionate OpenSCAD user and prefer it for many things, but there are several reasons I tend to work in FreeCAD sometimes, and recommend it to people:

- Way more functionality - STEP support - Constraint solver

Also it's much more point-and-clicky, in the same way Fusion is, so it's much less confusing for a Fusion user to transition to FreeCAD rather than OpenSCAD. That said, OpenSCAD is phenomenally powerful, it just requires you to think in a particular way. I happen to enjoy thinking that way and most of what I make ends up being OpenSCAD. I mostly use OpenSCAD to design parts, and FreeCAD to design assemblies and integrate parts into existing things.

If you're looking for an intermediate thing, check out cadquery, which uses the same geometry engine as FreeCAD but has a very OpenSCAD-like feel and language to it.

Thanks for the write up! I too think like openscad. But wow cadquery looks like quite an improvement and I’d prefer to work in python anyway.

Any warnings before I invest time learning it?

(Btw what’s the best way to edit an existing stl? I want to cut out the middle of a piece and pull the two halves together.)

Cadquery is a massive pain to install. Most users use conda to get all the dependencies going which is a horrible monstrosity. That's my biggest warning.

Openscad is the best for working with existing STLs. Say you have a centered 30x10x10 mm part and you want to remove the central 10mm. My strategy could be:

1. import the part, translate it by 5mm in positive x direction, and subtract from it a centered cube larger than the part that is moved in positive x direction so that it ends at x=0:

  difference(){
    translate([5,0,0])import("file.stl");
    translate([16,0,0])cube([32,12,12],center=true);
  }

2. import the part again, translate it by 5mm in negative x direction, and subtract from it a centered cube larger than the part that is moved in negative x direction so that it ends at x=0. Because this is so similar, you can reuse the code:

  for(dir=[-1,1])difference(){
    translate([dir*5,0,0])import("file.stl");
    translate([dir*16,0,0])cube([32,12,12],center=true);
  }

3. Make a watertight join between the two - you want to make sure the two shapes overlap a tiny bit. So we change the cut cube to be out of the origin line by 0.05mm:

  for(dir=[-1,1])difference(){
    translate([dir*5,0,0])import("file.stl");
    translate([dir*(16-0.05),0,0])cube([32,12,12],center=true);
  }

protip: prefix a negative shape with # to see it in the preview - like in the above replace cube with #cube

Thanks for the advice! That’s good to know I can edit stl’s right in openscad.

You can have a GPL interactive visual editing parametric constraint solver system also: SolveSpace. Just do it with the mouse. As in Blender

In addition to what the two (at this time) sibling posts mentioned, even for hobbyist level 3d printing:

* Openscad is unitless (lengths are like "1", not "1mm").

* Even simple fillets (rounded edges) are so annoying in openscad people leave them out. In Freecad you click the edge and click fillet, and it works even in complicated cases (e.g. multiple fillets overlapping).

* Freecad's constraint solving based approach tends to make your models easier to change than Openscad's scripting approach. In theory, openscad's approach is superior. But you would have to derive and write down the formulas for every parameter of every part, and so in practice you'll end up with too many hardcoded numbers, and your model won't be that easy to change. Changing where the constraints are (e.g. tube inner/outer diameter vs inner & thickness) is also easier in Freecad - especially when parts depend on each other.

* Freecad makes it easy to go back and forth between 2D and 3D drawings. Super useful.

It's like comparing Notepad++ to VS Code. They're both quality text editors. That's missing the point.

For hobby 3d printing (realistically that's 90% of why hobbyists are interested in CAD now, right?) I would recommend to learn both. OpenScad is very very fast to learn (like 1 hour for the concepts for someone who is already a programmer in any language, then you are good with the official cheatsheet) and nothing beats it for simple geometric one off models that you can write down in a few minutes. Freecad for anything beyond.

Also, if you need a simple but nice, easy and free 2D only CAD (e.g. for CNC milling or laser cutting - the type of work people abuse Inkscape for), check out Librecad. (Also check out qcad, the now commercial again product it's forked from. Credit where it's due and such.)

Freecad also aims to eventually become a complete suite. Qcad and Openscad only handle the CAD part. Freecad for example has a finite element method simulation that can be used to analyze stress. Freecad also has a CAM module (CAD is how the finished part should be, CAM is how you machine it. Like when you CNC mill, which tools, at what RPM, feed rate and turn direction, along which paths. Obviously for 3D printing it doesn't matter what Freecad has because you'll use a specialized tool like Cura (free) or Simplify3D (commercial) anyway.)

FreeCAD lets you do parametric modelling and well as seeing all of your changes while you're making them.

OpenSCAD is constructive solid geometry and you write a script then render it. You can essentially only create STL geometries with OpenSCAD, if you just plan to model and 3D print single parts OpenSCAD might be sufficient, anything more complex, particularly assemblies with multiple parts and you'll need a different CAD platform.

In general parametric modeling is far more popular it's how solidworks, onshape, fusion360, etc. work.

You can use word processing software like Microsoft Word to create documents or you can write the Postscript code that your printer requires to print documents. Both can produce nice documents but it is much more difficult to write Postscript.

I learned enough of OpenScad to create simple models but if I need something complex (and especially models that move), I used Fusion 360. I knew that it would cost $60 a month to me at some point and will need to evaluate if it is worth that much to me. While it's not pleasant to get something for free and then have to pay for it, it's not the first time it's happened and won't be the last.

I really want to like, and use freecad. I've tried multiple times, and a couple years ago stumbled on fusion360 and have been using it regularly ever since. Its one of the reasons I still use windows as my primary desktop (along with a couple other piece of software that don't have anything similar quality/price on linux).

Initially I watched a couple youtube videos and since then have created a few dozen things in fusion360 with little effort, rarely bumping into problems I couldn't solve without reading forums/etc to find other peoples solutions.

So, IMHO I _REALLY_ want an opensource solidworks/fusion360/etc competitor but at the moment its just not there yet. From the video's it looks like it should be, but once you start using it, its an endless ball of frustration.

  > Anyone looking to learn CAD probably ought to just jump
  > right to solidworks as a vendor that is at the very least
  > more predictable and has better return on your time.

I want to teach my daughters the principles of CAD, just as they've learned the principles of auto repair, Python, camping, and a host of other things. How am I going to run Solidworks on our Ubuntu home computers? How many hundreds of dollars does it cost?

I was looking to Autodesk Fusion 360 and even opened a team for our family recently. I decided on that after looking at FreeCAD, Solvespace, OpenSCAD, LibreCAD, and a few others, each of which had a fundamental dealbreaker. Perhaps it will have to be FreeCAD after all.

> How am I going to run Solidworks on our Ubuntu home computers? How many hundreds of dollars does it cost?

I was looking at Solidworks back in 2015 and got a call back from sales. I heard: "For a personal license, the first year will be $39.95 and if you want support and upgrades with that, it's an additional $12.95 per year."

That sounded incredibly reasonable to me, much cheaper than I'd expected, and I was ready to buy until she continued, "so it'll be a little over 5 grand for the first year's license and support". ($39.95 and $3995 are commonly pronounced exactly the same.)

> $39.95 and $3995 are commonly pronounced exactly the same

To non-English speakers, it is common to read "$3995" as "thirty-nine ninety-five". It is very rare to say "three thousand and nine hundred and ninety-five dollars".

Usually one understands from context. "I paid just over fifteen for a used car", I would assume thousand... ...but it could be car collectors talking about spending 15 million.

>How many hundreds of dollars does it cost?

Sadly, you're missing a zero.

Out of the whole bunch, FreeCAD is probably the best open source solution.

If you don't mind pending a bit of $, and need something parametric, then Alibre CAD ticks a lot of the same boxes as F360. Windows only though.

If OTOH you don't need parametric design, I've gotten pretty far with Rhino3D, although again that is Windows/Mac only.

Rhino also has Grasshopper for parametric/programmable design. The visual code aspect can be a little tedious though.

In my opinion, out of all of the CAD you listed, Solvespace is by far the best to teach someone starting out. The interface is not absolutely overwhelming unlike every other option, it is super fast and lightweight so you don't get frustrated, unlike every other option, and it is pretty amazingly reliable.

It is definitely limited in the complexity of items you can make with it, but it is amazing for learning mechanical CAD.

As someone working on Solvespace, what was the dealbreaker for you? I know it has shortcomings and different people would give different answers to this question.

Actually, what are your deal breakers for each of the programs you listed?

This issue with Fusion seems like it might be a good opportunity for Solvespace to get more attention. I know I've looked at Solvespace in the past, but it has always seemed stagnant, what with the website saying the last release was in 2016. Since it seems like it is still under development, it might be a good time to do a v2.3.1 release and update the downloads page, along with a note that v3.0 is "coming soon".

The intent is to get a 3.0 out soon (by the end of summer already passed). It will not have the major rework that was originally planned for 3.0 but it is quite a bit better than 2.3.

Actually, I liked SolveSpace so much that I tried to open a Reddit sub for it. You're invited to join!

https://www.reddit.com/r/SolveSpace

I got stuck trying to create a bracket, very similar to the bracket tutorial. I was unable to properly set the location of two of the holes symmetrically. It was just an exercise to learn the app, if you're really interested in helping I can try to reproduce it and see exactly what the issue was.

I'm certain that the problem was with my own understanding of SolveSpace constraints, not with SolveSpace itself. At the time I was deciding which CAD application to marry, not trying to solve a specific issue for which I had a need.

We have our older students at dexter.school use Onshape. It's a good web-based analog to Solidworks: https://www.onshape.com/

For standard users (eg non-educational), it seems to be priced US$1,500/year for the cheapest version:

https://www.onshape.com/pricing

FreeCAD is amazing, I just migrated to Fusion 360 for ease of use but I will have to go back I guess.

They aren't punishing, they are monetizing. Switching to another commercial product would just be repeating the mistake on your part.

There are no (i.e. zero) for-profit companies that aren't trying to sell you something at some point. The reason companies do these multi-year 'free' services is to eliminate as much of the competition as possible and/or build a brand. If you want something that will stay free, you really should be looking at Open Source/Free software and either be prepared to roll up your sleeves and periodically help out or donate money to fund ongoing development/support.

I don't have a problem giving them $360, I have a problem giving them $360 again next year to tweak a design I made last year.

Software subscriptions for hobbies are crazy, because who knows if I'm even going to use it ever again, yet all my effort is lost if I'm not paying them.

The old permanent license model is much better for hobbyist, if you need a new feature, then give them more money, but they aren't holding your creativity hostage if you only spent 10 mins messing with your hobby for 6 months.

How many people are really able to spend that kind of money on Fusion 360? Fair enough if you are one of the lucky few with thousands of pounds worth of CNC equipment in your garage.

I'm afraid this will be one of those clever MBA stories where someone comes in and looks at the number of personal users and thinks, gosh damn, if only we could monetise half of them at $800 we'd be rolling in it.

I guess they are lucky that people can't just do what they did with Photoshop in the 90s; yay for the cloud.

This is probably it. They see all those free users and think of them as "potential customers." They just don't realize/care that their "potential" is like $20-40 out of maybe 10% of them. And well, it's pretty hard to sell a product the the public for $20 then turn around and sell it to enterprises for $20,000.

Adobe at least offers lower cost products for their less sophisticated users.

But this IS the less sophisticated version. They still turn around and sell Autodesk Inventor to enterprise for way more than the $500/year for F360.

Fusion has one killer feature that Solidworks completley lacks (at least for me and my team). It works on Mac!

> punishing personal/hobby/learning users because another group that should be paying

The linked post is a guy who has been using Autodesk for 30+ years. If a guy who has benefitted from an application for 30+ years shouldn't be paying, who should?

They have a totally free 1 year license, so if you are learning, that'll get you much of the way through school.

EDIT: I removed the suggestion that he had never paid for it.

The issue isn't paying, it's how much you have to pay to get in. $10-15/m for a hobby makes sense, $80/m doesn't.

If someone came out with a hobbyist license that was cheap to get with some limitations (no commercial, no cloud rendering), it would absolutely be fair.

You're not making money out of your hobby, you're paying out of pocket to learn a skill that you enjoy.

I read the limitations carefully. I think only the lack of STEP export is a showstopper. The rest seems pretty much OK for hobby use.

Also, as a side note, I would be happy to pay a subscription fee, just perhaps not $499/year, for "advanced hobby use". Autodesk could look more into separating hobbyists from businesses, I'm sure it's possible.

The problem is that after OnShape went full commercial, this is the only relatively inexpensive option with history-based parametric modeling.

Save the 10 model limit. The recent addition of the tools to help with "bottom up" design provides a nicer workflow for a lot of cases, but would prevent you from having more than nine components in your assembly (the assembly being the 10th) which seems too little even for the smallest of hobbyist projects. It would be reasonable if there is an exception for models included in an assembly. Apparently that restriction is not coming until next year, so time will tell.

Agreed. Based on my (admittedly limited) usage of Fusion 360 for 3d printing related hobby use, I don't see my personal usage of it being affected by any of the changes.

But I've definitely benefited from other people using those features, and it seems likely they were on the same hobbyist license.

> this is the only relatively inexpensive option with history-based parametric modeling.

Not true, there is Houdini (sidefx.com). It's main target audience is obviously VFX professionals, but it's history features are much better than F360. Modelling toolset is also excellent. The issue is that it's missing any engineering stuff, you need to hunt down or make plugins for those. It's apprentice edition is free, and their limitations don't affect the modelling capabilities (free edition are mostly gimped at realistic rendering and can't be used by companies)

Houdini doesn't appear to be a solid modeller, so it'll have the same problem(s) that Blender has. eg: The models it creates aren't exportable to any solid based format (STEP, IGES) that a CAM system could use for making parts with.

https://www.sidefx.com/products/compare/

That being said, if people are just doing 3d printing then there are probably "good enough" workarounds, as Blender does.

The free "Houdini Apprentice" version seems like it might fulfil that need:

https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini-apprentice/

Looks like it also runs on Linux, unlike Fusion 360:

https://www.sidefx.com/Support/system-requirements/

The compare page doesnt list every format it can export to. I've successfully exported STL from the free version, here are the supported geometry formats. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/io/formats/geometry_form...

and to add to my previous comment, it can export geometry in IGES (but not STEP). Here are all the geometry formats it can export https://i.imgur.com/RnQ82mX.png This is the free version

Thanks, that's good info. :)

It doesn't appear to be a solid modeller, but for 3d printing it should still be workable.

$8-10 a month would be awesome, and they would probably make a ton of money using that subscription model. It's short sighted that they don't do this.

For someone like me who would use it for a week, wait two years, then use it for another week, $8-$10 per month is prohibitory. I would happily pay for quality software, and I do pay for the Jetbrains tools which I use daily, but for software that I use very intermittently I need a buy-once-use-forever model.

The case where you need something one week every two years is precisely when "pay one month to use it now" makes more sense than "pay to use it without limits and do not use it".

So pay as you use. They already save all your stuff. You just can't have a lot open at once, IIUC.

Actually, they don't "save all your stuff". They require "your stuff" to be in their cloud, with no local download option, and if you do not use the service for N months, your account is purged.

And I don't care if N is 3 or if N is 36 or if N is 86400. I don't trust a single storage place for any data I care about. Having it only in their cloud is absolutely not an option, even if there weren't danger of them deliberately erasing it if I don't pay regularly.

Eesh. Man I wish freecad was better. I got my daughter up on F360 in a matter of minutes (and that was after I used the app myself for about that long).

If they had some $100/yr family maker plan, I'd be all about that. Same for any reasonable competition.

That would probably be sufficient for light industrial use as well though. And those are the customers they are trying to "shake down". No judgement, but that's the problem with hobbyist stuff that is professional grade... cheap professionals use it.

OnShape what now? I'm still on the free-but-everything-is-public plan. Is that going away?

Isn't that limited now? I remember being excited about OnShape when they were getting started, and then they limited the free plan quite a bit.

So far.

You paint as a hobby, you buy paint, canvass and brushes. You read as a hobby you buy books. You bike as a hobby you buy a bike. You use CAD as a hobby you pay for CAD. Not everything is cheap, some hobbies are expensive, others are not. Buying books is cheap, buying a bike is not. I'm tired of people talking about free software as their right. People who make the software also have families to feed.

One thing I want to point out here is that (books aside), paint and bicycles are physical, rival goods- there are only so many bicycles, and creating a new bicycle means significant resources and manpower need to be used.

F360 is not that- if Autodesk somehow magically knew whether an individual was willing to pay $500/year for a subscription, there'd be little reason for Autodesk not to give everybody who can't afford it F360 for free.

Take somebody like me, for example. I am not going to buy a F360 subscription. But I want to learn CAD. (I'm familiar with OpenSCAD...but also familiar with its limits.) Previously, I was torn between FreeCAD and Fusion; now FreeCAD is clearly the best option for me.

So now I'm going to have FreeCAD experience, not Fusion experience. And any designs I release will be FreeCAD files, not Fusion files. And if somebody else happens to ask me for CAD help, I can't help them if it's Fusion, but I might be able to if it's FreeCAD. And any bugs I run into in FreeCAD, I might help fix.

This seems clearly worse for Autodesk than a world where I picked Fusion because of their hobbyist-friendly licensing. Not much worse! But worse.

The choice for me is not between paying Autodesk and not paying Autodesk. I'm not paying $500 annually no matter what! The question is whether Autodesk lets me use Fusion for my hobby/personal products, at no cost to them, or whether they push me towards a competing ecosystem. The latter seems like it makes everyone worse off, at least in my particular case- that's what makes this so disappointing.

This is the worst argument I've ever seen. "Bikes are physical but software is not, therefore it doesn't cost significant resources and manpower to be used".

Building and maintaining software costs money. The cost of hiring one engineer and paying them mid range income in Bay Area would equate to about 1000 hobbyists paying the ~$300 licensing fee per year. And it DEFINITELY costs more than one engineer to build and maintain good software.

For years companies tried to squeeze the enterprise customers more so that they can fund hobbies for others. And when finally they can't anymore and decide to charge for SOME FEATURES, while still keeping a freemium tier alive, everyone starts talking about the big evil corp.

You have to realize that companies like Autodesk keep so many products alive even when they are losing money on them (look up their financials) for years, quite thanklessly.

Sorry- my argument must have been very easy to misunderstand.

My point is that the marginal cost of a hobbyist user, who receives no support, is approximately zero. At no point did I say developing Fusion must have been cheap or easy! What I was trying to say is that those costs are unrelated to the number of hobbyists using the software- Autodesk does not need to hire extra engineers to let me use Fusion. (Support is the big catch here- but I don't expect support from a free tier!).

This is distinct from, for example, a mass-produced bicycle- there, yes, you still have NRE up front (design, hopefully testing, molds/tooling...), but a significant part of the cost of each bicycle is related to the cost of the input materials plus labor. That's not the case with software! With software, practically everything (again, support aside) is a sort of NRE- it's a fixed cost, no matter how many copies you make. Thus, if you somehow definitively knew that a particular customer will not pay for your software, and that their usage of it has benefits for you (greater adoption, the chance to convert them (or their employer) to a paid user later, etc) it would make sense to allow them to use it without paying- the cost to you is ~0 (mostly just bandwidth), but the benefit is non-negligible.

This is not true for a bicycle. If somebody cannot pay for a bicycle, and I am manufacturing bicycles, it generally doesn't make sense to give them a free bicycle unless I'm getting something else out of it that's worth at least as much as the cost to build one additional bicycle - i.e. the cost of parts and labor. But note that the cost to design the bicycle is not part of the calculation there- because it doesn't depend on how many bicycles I build from that design.

The distinction between rival and non-rival goods is very interesting, and I don't blame you at all for not understanding it. It can be counterintuitive!

Does that make more sense? Again, sorry if I was unclear!

Right. But there's a couple of things I'd like to point out.

1. These days, for Softwares, development costs are fixed, but there are also marginal costs associated with operations, especially when the product is on cloud. Yes, support is part of the equation, and different users get different amount of support, but that's not the only marginal cost. (Trust me even free ones get some support)

2. This move probably isn't about recovering back marginal costs. It's about recovering the fixed costs. The pricing model limits newer features like generative design to paid users, which is expected, because they need to hire engineers to build new features and maintain existing product. So they're limiting that functionality to paid customers. In the bike analogy, it would be something like buying accessories for your bike.

3. The change in pricing model does reflect what you're actually saying. There is still a free tier which allows for basic usage. But all the things that contribute to additional costs to the company are being taken away. You get 10 documents, but for more you'll have to pay. Because with cloud products, to store more data, they would probably either have to maintain servers additional servers or pay cloud providers for storage, in either case, it costs money.

Why would you move your product into the cloud if it only increased your marginal costs? You move into the cloud to increase your marginal revenue.

You've got this argument by the wrong end. You don't raise your prices because you had to because, well, cloud. You move to cloud specifically so you can raise your price. You might also argue that you move to cloud to reduce marginal costs of distribution, but that's arguable.

Your comment makes no sense in this context.

The people are not talking about free software as their right. It just sucks the price went from free to ~$300/y.

We all know Autodesk can do whatever they want. But they created an expectation by providing free features for years.

All they did is make people loose trust in them.

Most personal users will just move to other free or cheaper software.

US$500 actually, just currently on sale for $300.

I point it out because I do think that's a meaningfully different price point.

Not forgetting your Windows licence or MacBook.

Remember when Bill Gates started his new life as a philanthropist by donating tons of money to schools? Only it wasn't really money. It was lots of Windows licenses or Office licences that were worth a lot of money. So it arguably didn't cost Gates anything, but just grew future earnings. He kept all these students from gaining familiarity with the competition, encouraging them and their employers to buy licenses later for the product they had learned as a child.

There's the downside.

Short answer: Their software will lose mind share, and therefore market share in the long run.

Your implication here seems to be that Autodesk can't possibly be doing something bad because they have "families to feed", get a grip man. The idea that a billion dollar company is somehow financially equivalent to a mom-and-pop grocery store just a few lost purchases away from ruin and going through hard times is insane. The idea highly paid software engineers for a billion dollar company will suddenly be out on the streets, wearing barrels-on-suspenders by Friday all due to Fusion 360, not in a brand new job by the next week, is mostly ridiculous. People have got to get it through their heads that billion dollar companies do not operate by the same constraints as the rest of us, they aren't charging money because they need to, but because they can. "You" actually aren't a relevant variable at all and never will be, and neither is your purchase. That's how these things work, software or not.

They're charging an entry fee where there wasn't one before. They want your money, and decided this was a good way to get it from a userbase they already had cultivated. They aren't going to pay their software engineers more money or any of that, they aren't going to make Fusion 360 more "sustainable", they could do that overnight with the cash they have, so all of that stuff about "software engineers have families" isn't actually relevant in the slightest, that's just a scapegoat corporate wants you to believe in. They're just trying to get more money. It's that simple and has absolutely nothing to do with the product. If you can't see or understand why people might be irritated by that (an entry fee where none existed prior and where it's mostly just making billion dollar corporations richer than they already are), I suggest you try actually looking at the state of the world around you for once in your life.

> You bike as a hobby you buy a bike.

I did buy a bike in 2004 and another one in 2009. Both were pretty expensive so I don't shy away from spending money on hobbies I enjoy.

Thing is, today I still have both bikes and I still ride them both every week. I don't need to pay Specialized again every year just to keep using them.

Happy to pay for software, even somewhat expensive software. But it better work forever. I'm not paying for apps that expire and want me to pay again for the same thing. That's not acceptable in a hobby/personal market.

> I don't need to pay Specialized again every year just to keep using them.

The difference is that Specialized doesn't maintain or repair your bike and they certainly don't add new features/components to it over time. Those are services Autodesk is expected to provide.

The thing is there's some tools and technologies that humanity deserves to offer itself (a.k.a to develop a high quality OSS offering). Don't get scared by this statement, just bare with me for a second and assume it to be true. Humanity has offered itself OSS/copyfree/patent free technological gifts like an OS kernel, an SCM tool, an electronic CAD software, ML/data science packages, the wheel, etc. I posit that we need to produce long lasting artifacts that anyone, anywhere, can use and reproduce, especially if those artifacts are core to reaching our current technological level. This way, 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, we'll all have been the better for it.

A mechanical CAD software, I believe, falls in that category of "humanity should have this in OSS". I think Fusion360 being free and easily accessible made great strides toward this, in the sense that it sort of democratized access to CAD: a lot of people learned to use CAD with it. Now that "gift", which was obviously not free or OSS, has been rescinded and people are coming off their cloud, down to earth and telling themselves that yeah, it wasn't going to last forever and they ought to have known, and it's probably time to make put our hands at work toward making this tech an OSS asset for humanity.

My bike was free! For anyone reading this who needs a bike, people sometimes give away free bikes on Craigslist.

I read that comment too, and went -> Free books from the library. Free drawing at the community centre. Free bikes on craigslist/gumtree.

Granted someone is paying for this, or I have already paid for it out of my taxes, but the listed hobbies can be done for free with enough effort.

Err, there's still a free tier for everyone. There's also free tier with additional features for educators and students.

> Granted someone is paying for this

Yeah, someone does. So if you want free software, someone needs to pay. Free isn't really free.

You still pay for a library membership, or like you said tax dollars for community center. Free bikes on craigslist almost 90% of times needs investment. Let's stop pretending that hobbies are actually free.

All of those have incremental costs to reproduce. The variable cost for software is practically zero.

Yeah, because the people that wrote the software aren't worthy to be paid for their skills.

I don't get your point here. Why should some users pay and others not?

I think you meant "marginal cost", and in software it mostly comes from the cost of engineers and infrastructure that maintain, create, and deliver the software. Nowadays that includes bandwidth, storage, and compute for any cloud component. Software is only zero marginal cost if you create it, release it, and never touch it again.

> and in software it mostly comes from the cost of engineers and infrastructure that maintain, create, and deliver the software.

Those are all fixed costs, the cost of development is the same, regardless of whether you have 5 or 500 users.

> Nowadays that includes bandwidth, storage, and compute for any cloud component.

Download bandwidth, sure (though that can mostly be mitigated with BitTorrent). The rest, well, that's on you for building in dependencies on cloud bullshit.

Yes, cloud bullshit, which is currently running the world based on the size and scale of the cloud providers.

More users = more feature demand = more bugs = more use cases = larger development team. Engineering is only a fixed cost if you’re naive or an economics major studying for an exam.

To me this is more akin to whether you are allowed to paint or bike. It’s getting up one day and riding to your favorite trail only to find the owner decided to charge for it since it’s so popular. It’s in their right to do it, but a pretty bad faith move.

I was struggling to get past this first comment where the poster says:

> I have had various commercial, home-use and free licenses with Autodesk since about 1990.

If you've been using a product for 30 years and never paid for it, it's really hard to complain.

I'm not a big fan of Autodesk for various reasons, but if you are a hobbyist, there are affordable alternatives. If they need the more advanced features Autodesk offers versus competition, you can pay for them.

I can't find that comment for context- wouldn't a commercial license be paid (and home-use might be, too, considering they split it out from "free")?

Sure. But he also mentions free licenses which are indeed "free". He also says in the next line "Are any other free users..." which means he's on a free license now.

Yes there is plenty of entitlement in software, mostly from folks who have never run a software business. Queue video-game enthusiasts that think the $60 price of the game somehow facilitates providing content updates, bug fixes, and hosting multiplayer servers until the heat death of the universe.

There is significantly distorted public perception of the true costs of software. The hidden subsidies of advertising monetization and data collection have done an excellent job of this. In Autodesk's case, it was enterprise customers paying tens and hundreds of thousands for license seats, so that private parties could use it for free.

The alternative for autodesk may be to show Ads in the software, or collect data about what you're designing for ad profiles. I'm sure people would love that as an alternative.

Which generation? Is that based on survey data about beliefs about intellectual property law in different age groups, or is it more of a hunch you have?

The funny part is that even if you could produce direct evidence for that, I guarantee that like most discussions about this sort of topic, the itty-bitty teensy-tiny fact that "wages have completely stagnated over the past 3 decades in the West and younger generations have less comparative wealth than ever before" somehow wouldn't enter the conversation for some reason. This isn't even debatable but somehow easily forgotten. Oh, and that's assuming it's a complaint about younger generations ruining things. Which it always, 100% of the time, is.

Like: Hmmmm, gee whiz, can't imagine why consumers who have been sold up the river into using nothing but ad-funded spyware freemium apps, funded with VC cash from Saudi Aramco but still losing $500,000,000 every second in the name of "growth", a generation who have less money than ever before with completely dead-end wages while cost of living continues to rise, might not want to pay for things. Surely the answer is that "They are entitled", because clearly they're all actually flush with cash, and just don't want to pay. There isn't any other possible other external factors involved, because "Society" isn't actually real, after all, and externalities don't actually exist. I'm a very smart computer programmer whose intellect should be taken seriously on these matters.

A hunch based on online discussions and sites like this one, dedicated to creating new business, but every time some posts a nice commercial tool, there are dozens of posts with copy-cats that do half of the work, but hey they are free beer.

This is a fascinatingly entitled attitude. So you think you deserve to be paid for doing the same as someone else, for a higher price, but worse?

Everyone deserves to be paid for the fruits of their labour.

Could you source or back up your claim that there are generational differences at work here? I don't really follow.

Survey of local coffee shops with laptops full of penguin and red devil logos, and common discussion threads every time someone shows nice commercial tools aimed at developers.

The guy in the original story has been using Autodesk for 30+ years and is currently on a "Free" license. I guess the generation which refuses to pay for other's work is Generation X? As a Gen Xer, I don't appreciate that generalization.

EDIT: Updated the comment about the amount of time he's been freeloading.

The comment you have been spraying all over this thread points out having commercial licenses, which are NOT free. Stop spreading BS

On re-reading it, I think it is less clear than when I originally read it. Regardless, it's a bit of hair-splitting because he's clearly been using the free license for at least a portion of that time.

I updated the comment.

I would be so happy if Blender tackled parametric modeling like this.

Tried FreeCAD, gave up in frustration after I drew a second sketch on the face of an object and no matter what I did it wouldn't extrude.

After that went poorly I'd just picked up Fusion 360 about a month ago and have been doing pretty well with that. Whoops.

The trouble is that Blender is fundamentally the wrong platform to build a parametric (solid body) modeller on. Everything in blender is a mesh, whereas in a parametric solid body modeller everything is a BREP[0]. It would ether need a new BREP kernel or to include an existing open source BREP kernel, the most advanced being OpenCASCADE which FreeCAD is built upon. Would love to be proved wrong though!

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation 1: https://www.opencascade.com

Actually, blender supports many more basic objects than meshes, it's just that the basic shape must be convertible to a mesh eventually. Which is also the case in any other software, because GPUs only support mesh rasterization.

So, you could implement a BREP object along with primitives to convert it to a mesh and it would work just fine. There are already objects such as particles, metaballs, hairs, NURBS, splines, and so on.

Brep is just a polygon mesh. Speaking as a person who has to juggle them occasionally at work.

So the current Blender modeling options are isomorphic to those of a BREP modeller. All it would need are some more constraints.

What is lacking, is the parametric history.

Blender is mostly meshes, but it can already have other geometry types like NURBS. You can convert a nurbs object to a mesh, but the modeling process and data format is totally different. I'm imagining that the solid modeling system would be a separate mode type like that.

Still, blender is not a CAD tool. It's great to great organic designs (characters, animals, figurines, etc.) but it's not good for functional parts. And it will never be, CAD and 3D modeling for organic/art are fundamentally different.

I wonder how much work it would be to turn it into a proper CAD tool. I would donate a significant chunk of my paycheck to Blender if it supported parametric CAD.

Obviously that would be pocket change to the Blender Foundation, but if enough people did then maybe it would be worth it. I'd wager there a fairly big group of people like me who need somewhat decent CAD for hobby use. And if those who can afford to pay put that money towards Blender, we could make it better overall for those who can't.

> I wonder how much work it would be to turn it into a proper CAD tool.

Never used it myself but there are some CAD tool addons you can try -- also they seem to have incorporated some 'hard modeling' features which, I would imagine, aren't that far from the CADiverse.

Also, unless they worked on it (semi)recently, the NURBS in blender is a bit of a trainwreck which everyone was scared to even look in its direction.

I went through the same exact issue with FreeCAD and eventually ended up using http://solvespace.com/index.pl It's FOSS and works really well. Isn't as fully featured as Fusion360, but I personally love its interface

I just found that linked in r/3dprinting last night on a discussion about the Autodesk's new Fusion 360 bullshit, it's on my list to try out!

If SolveSpace doesn't pan out for me I'll try OpenSCAD next, but I gather there are some issues with that modeling approach where fillets/chamfers are much more challenging to create than they are in a graphical modeller.

With OpenSCAD, you don't have fillets as part of the language, but you can do chamfers or machinable parts easily using the minkowski sum operation, which basically places an object of your choice on every point along the surface of another object. I've used this to do insets and outsets, radiused corners, and all sorts of other funky stuff.

However, if you want that sort of operations you would probably be better off with cadquery, which is basically the engine behind FreeCAD, with a really powerful Python interface. It has native support for face operations like fillets.

No idea if I'm doing something wrong, but minkowski operations seem to cause OpenSCAD's preview and rendering to become extremely slow real quick, on the order of minutes for models with several such parts.

minkowski and hull operate on every vertex in your object mesh - this means they need to a) convert the solid into a mesh and b) do math for every combination of vertices in said mesh. That's O(n^2) operations for objects of complexity n. This means that they are much slower than csg operations (that operate on the underlying geometry rather than the mesh). They are definitely the slowest (but most powerful) operators in OpenSCAD. If you're doing something like minkowski-adding a sphere to a complex shape, use $fn=(some low number) on the sphere to reduce face count and speed things up initially while you're hacking around, then increase it again before final render.

When using SolveSpace, please build from source or get it from the snap store. The last official release is almost 4 years old. Its come pretty far since then.

Thank you! I did not realize that the release is so far behind. I've mentioned this on the SolveSpace Reddit sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/SolveSpace/comments/iun270/heads_up...

Ah fun, that probably means I have to use this in Windows because I don't think Apple will let me build from source.

Just to check if any Mac developers wander into the comments - is it possible to build and run software on Mojave without an Apple Developer subscription, or is that now an absolute requirement due to the notarization system?

Just to let you know, I oped a Reddit sub for solvespace: https://www.reddit.com/r/SolveSpace/

It's fairly new, so currently has very little traffic. But if you've got good questions, can give good answers, or have interesting projects to share it would be great to have you subscribe.

My expectation is as companies like Adobe, Autodesk, et al become more bloated in their cloud pricing two things will happen:

a) First, nuking the hobbyist/amateur users asphyxiates your future pipeline. These people will now use and invest their time in open source alternatives. Free open source alternatives that have downsides, over time will no longer have downsides.

b) Your big corporate customers will independently finance the development of those open source platforms.

As someone who first used Blender when it was a year or two old, and then didn't look at it again until 2.8: wow, they have done a damn good job. It isn't Maya or Modo, and misses some unique use cases, but it is amazingly easy to use. Learning curve from start to working animated model in game engine was hours not days.

If Blender is any indication, the open source software tools are on a trajectory to be a lot better than the commercial stuff given enough time and focus.

I know of Sverchok, a Blender plugin to do parametric modeling based on nodes/dataflow/visual programming (if you know what I mean).

http://nikitron.cc.ua/sverchok_en.html

https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok

Interesting, it doesn't look particularly geared toward mechanical parts, but I'll have to check this out!

The critical thing is that Fusion 360 and similar tools use a non-destructive parametric workflow. Everything is defined based on sketches with dimensions and constraints like "this angle is 30 degrees, these lines are parallel, this is a right angle, this radius is 3 cm" and you can go back in at any point to change a previous dimension, even if it was on the very first shape you started building from. The whole object recalculates from the new design.

The CAD addons for blender are helpful for doing some more precise drawing actions (like finding the intersection point of two edges, which blender doesn't normally give you), but they're still fundamentally in a destructive mesh workflow. You have a pile of vertices/edges/faces, you do some editing, and you have a different pile of verticies/edges/faces. There's some stuff doable with non-destructive modifiers, but they're for very limited specific tasks.

I think that with a bit of work, an addon could build on the boolean modifiers (among others) and create something fairly powerful.

Well, I guess I'm glad I didn't invest in that Fusion360 course that I had been eyeing.

$300/year (temporarily discounted from $500) is way too much for "advanced hobby use". I think $50/year or $100/major version is my limit for hobby software.

I always though it was a cludgy, bloated piece of software and despite a few attempts to get into it, never really did.

I particularly disliked having to upload files to their 'cloud' for conversion between formats or even (if memory serves) for slicing objects. Not really what I'm comfortable doing with client's assets.

(And i was on acommercial license for a year or two, gifted by them in some promo as it may have been).

I too echo the sentiment of langitbiru elsewhere in this thread - with the inflation in the home hobbyist scene over the past few years, I wonder what it would take for an Affinity-a-like to shake up the domain a little.

I wonder how much Blender could be modded to achieve this?

Fusion 360 used to be very buggy. It isn't anymore. Change in speed is harder to judge since improvements have been very gradual, but the days of waiting endlessly on processing that can't be interrupted is pretty much over.

According to friends of mine who do fabrication it is a lot more stable than the high end stuff they have to use which costs an absolute fortune. That stuff is, apparently, "buggy as f*ck".

I don't think Blender is an option or even a useful starting point for a replacement. It solves an entirely different problem and any similarity in problem domain being addressed is purely superficial. (Get a fabrication professional to take you through their CNC workflow to get an understanding of how it is used).

The dependence on the cloud sucks for two reasons: Autodesk can make all of your work go away at any moment and Autodesk have never done much to optimize uploads/saves so they are slow.

For the record, I actually run a CNC and a laser professionally and whilst I'm not intimately familiar with Blender, I know how other 'non-specific' software can be modified and/or used as a starting point for creating project files.

It might not perhaps suffice for the creation of a building or a jetplane, but for hobbyist use, I don't see why not.

For instance - I use Adobe Illustrator as a 2D 'CAD' program, purely because I find it MUCH quicker to work with than the likes of AutoCAD (which I gave up on years ago).

I just found Fusion360 incredibly slow. Perhaps things have changed since, but I last looked at it about 8 months ago.

I downgraded my account from a startup license to a personal a couple months ago. I went from never seeing any particular slowness in the app, to seeing a number of waiting on cloud function dialogs.

I bet all the personal licenses are running on a single cloud instance, while the paying users get reasonable response times.

If Illustrator suffices and is "faster" than AutoCAD for your workflow, then you probably don't actually have a big need for Fusion 360 in the first place. But there are a lot of people who actually do things where parametric, constraint based design is quite important for productivity.

Again.. hobbyists - but more to the point, it's perfectly possible to 'manually' do parametric constraints on moderately simple 2.5D geometries on the fly with a bit of logic using software that isn't necessarily built with that in mind. It's a cludge, sure, but if Fusion360 slows down 80% of your workflow where it's not doing much fancy, then that points to there being somewhere better, perhaps simpler, tools could be used.

-ed

Believe me - I wanted to like Fusion - I had the thing for a while and tried, but.. meh. It felt like a free product. At best.

> According to friends of mine who do fabrication it is a lot more stable than the high end stuff they have to use which costs an absolute fortune. That stuff is, apparently, "buggy as f* ck".

Ayup. I found that SolidWorks+MasterCAM was continually a disaster and crashed all the time.

Fusion360 works really well for a non-professional level CAD and CAM system (and, to be fair, it will carry you a long way toward even professional use). I used to run rings around the Solidworks/MasterCAM people on the Haas CNC at our makerspace.

While I understand the complaints of everyone here, the equivalent in SolidWorks land is almost $10K (SolidWorks+MasterCAM+a couple extras).

If Fusion360 really is too expensive, please go use FreeCAD--they need users, tutorials, coders, etc.

For anyone who has dealt with Autodesk in a professional setting in the last 2 decades, this was 100% expected.

They are an awful company whose entire business model is "the first hit is free, kids!".

I can get things like limiting cloud storage (if they actually offered offline storage). But removing .step export? That's just 100% "screw you, now we have your projects and you can't get them out".

Thread from yesterday: Changes to Fusion 360 for Personal Use https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653

I have been using fusion 360 as a hobbiest for a few years now, and this is certainly disappointing to see but unfortunately not surprising. I am not a fan of having online based file management either, but that is how a lot of these tools extend themselves to be more of a "service" and then get subscription dollars. Circuit maker by Altium is another example.

One possible alternative is Solid Edge by Siemens- they've had a "community edition" which is free for hobby and education use. It isn't as popular as Solid works or Creo but it is a full featured tool. It does have a full featured price as well of course once you go commerical (these tools are $5-20k per seat per year generally)

Inflammatory title, and not the title of the linked article.

As a 3D printing hobbyist who uses F360, I don't see these changes having a major effect on me or many of the people who post on r/3Dprinting and r/functionalprint. (I'm not sure they'll have any effect on me.)

TechShop leaned pretty heavily on it. So did a local spinoff group designed to rise from the (local) ashes of TechShop.

I wonder what will take its place.

I'm so confused about Autodesk's licensing now. I have an Eagle subscription at $100 a year and a number a months ago they bundled in F360 with it, which was a welcome change. But now, F360 alone is $300 a year (and they say it comes with a free Eagle subscription??). How are there two pricing models?

Am I going to be surprised by a 300% cost increase when my subscription renews? Are they going to force me to subscribe to F360 to get Eagle? Thankfully I just renewed, so I won't have to worry about this for at least a year, but this is frustrating.

I'm a fusion360 user, mostly for simple 3d printed things. I had already stopped recommended it to people last year when they started messing with the hobby/startup license.

Frankly, I would be perfectly willing to toss a couple hundred dollars at them if it were a boxed product that I "owned" and could reinstall in 10 years. But they don't offer that, its a rental model or nothing. After all, I paid for simply3d, despite there being a bunch of free slicers, because it works well and I can use it for an hour or so a year (because I use it in 5 min bursts) without fretting over continuous payment.

In the end, I will probably give TurboCad another spin in a year or so when the next set of fusion360 feature removals happen. I used it a bit a few years ago and have that copy, and they continue to sell a "permanent" license version that is fairly reasonably priced. Plus, it looks like they have done a fair bit of additional work to make it work better for 3d.

For the time being though, I will save off my drawings, and donate some $ to freecad https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate to encourage them.

While I'm disappointed in the changes, I both disagree with the characterization of "almost useless" and with the editorializing that's inherent in choosing that title for this submission to HN.

The changes are painful (especially the lack of STEP export), but that stops well short of "almost useless" IMO.

It really is almost useless, there's not really a way to get useful 3D models out anymore.

I've used it many dozens of times for 3D printed parts which I expect will continue to work just fine to export STL files.

It wouldn't surprise me if there are more hobbyist users making STL files for 3D printed parts than all other hobbyist use cases combined. (If you add 2-and-a-half-D CAD/CAM [also still pretty well supported], I'd wager a large sum that it's still useful for more than half the current hobbyist user base.)

I can go to "Tools -> Make" and the selected body will be sent to my makerboat desktop app. This means there is a reasonable easy way to add apps to F360 (since I doubt MakerBoat is so big for Autodesk to make a special thing for them), which means you can export in whatever way you want.

I've been using Fusion 360 for about a year for hobbyist projects. It's been intuitive, fresh, very capable and the learning curve was long-ish but not steep. A spacemouse makes it an absolute joy to work with once you get your motor skills adapted.

~ $300/year is not trivial, but it's more than reasonable if you're using it for "a lot" of stuff. I would say that 10+ projects in a year is using it a lot. CAM with FIVE-AXIS milling is a lot, needing to use the cloud for rendering is a lot. Simulation, generative design and custom extensions are a lot. If you're doing all of those things, you're definitely on the far edge of "hobbyist" and should be forking over some money.

True, I'm using it fairly often, but the only thing that affects me from that list is "Project storage is limited to 10 active and editable documents". And by that I mean I need to delete the crap I have there, I can survive with 1.

There are other free-as-in-beer options but the only ones that don't have a risk of this happening are the open source packages, of which FreeCAD and SolveSpace are the only current viable 3D options.

If you need a parametric cad package for small assemblies or occasional use FreeCAD is most likely workable. I've been using FreeCAD in a light-duty professional capacity for several years now and will be happy to help out anyone who wants to transition to it (email is in my profile).

They have a decent tutorials page[0] here for getting started with the basics.

[0] https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials

So we have the cheaper alternatives of Adobe Photoshop which are Affinity Photo and Gimp.

How hard is to build the equivalent of "Affinity Photo" to Autodesk Fusion 360? Maybe this is a good startup idea.

It's a great startup idea, almost guaranteed exit through acquisition by Autodesk et al.

> How hard is to build the equivalent of "Affinity Photo" to Autodesk Fusion 360? Maybe this is a good startup idea.

Answer: It's extremely hard to build any equivalent to Fusion 360 or any full featured CAD/CAM tool. This is not a weekend hackathon problem!

There are so many fundamental building blocks, with many requiring teams of PhDs to produce: CAD kernels, constraint solvers, file format interop, sketching tools, assembly support (mating), simulation, etc... Not to mention the manufacturing specific modeling tools for sheet metal, generative design for milling & 3D printing.

So it can be considered as hard as building VR headset (Oculus)? Is it what we call a moonshot project?

If you want to build each individual piece without licensing from Siemens/Dassault, then yes this would compare to a moonshot.

Parasolid, the CAD kernel owned by Siemens, is more than 30 years old at this point. The same amount of effort has gone into many of the other building blocks as well. OPENCASCADE is a FOSS CAD kernel but doesn't work well for real CAD, and support is hard to come by for companies building on it.

Most startups tend to license these tools instead of building them, but that comes at a large cost that must be pushed down to customers, hence the $$$$ cost of CAD today.

They also have a massive global team of really brilliant people working on NX and the related components. I'm talking former NASA employees who worked on components for the space shuttle or Mars rovers work there. That's the kind of expertise you can't really buy or acquire as an OSS project.

Plus, they are not shy about acquisitions. It's how they maintain their dominance. Any company that builds a remotely useful product in that space will find themselves sitting in front of a Big Fucking Check that's going to be hard to turn down. Anyone who turns it down will probably find themselves sitting in front of several patent lawsuits all over the world.

FreeCAD, OpenSCAD are FOSS alternatives.

For "free as in beer" there's OnShape with the caveat that all your projects in the free tier are public, and that it runs on the browser or via mobile apps. The iPadOS app has Apple Pencil support which is pretty neat.

Unfortunately FreeCAD is kind of unusable (in the same way that KiCAD is), and OpenSCAD isn't an alternative at all.

The only decent FOSS parametric CAD software I've found is SolveSpace, but it is quite limited, e.g. it doesn't even have a bevel tool, and there's no CAM. It's pretty much the Notepad of CAD.

CAD is just one of those things that is too complicated and niche for FOSS to do well.

> CAD is just one of those things that is too complicated and niche for FOSS to do well.

It's arguably too complicated for hackers to do well in their spare time, but there are plenty of FOSS projects in similarly complicated niche areas. The most successful ones tend to have companies or consortiums backing them, who aren't looking to make money on the softare itself but have it complement or support their other activities. OpenModelica for one example.

I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar, Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative and get something standard that they can rely on forever. I don't think it would cost them more than 3rd party software in the long run.

  > in the long run

That's your answer. Seriously.

People have taken the initiative and talked to the engineering departments and bean counters at large engineering houses (brands you're not familiar with, that do the engineering for e.g. Ford, etc but not the design which is typically in-house). The reasons are A) short term cost with no benefit, B) having to train staff, and C) compatibility with extant files. Not only will the current staff have to be retrained but nobody can be hired with experience with the tool.

> I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar, Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative and get something standard that they can rely on forever.

The problem for these businesses is that their internal CAD libraries are essentially proprietary tooling, they don't have an interest in making it open source, and much of the tooling around those libraries and software packages is proprietary or patented.

It's kind of analogous to Qualcomm's stranglehold over cellular communications. If you don't pay them you're also throwing away decades of IP and tooling around it, and lose interoperability.

Cadquery is a very nice python only API, based on the OpenCascade, much better API then FreeCAD. So someone looking to make parametric models via code, I think it's the best option out there.

What are the limitations of openscad?

The biggest one is that everything is done via, essentially, writing a program that creates the geometry; there's no interaction with a GUI.

It's fine for making stuff that is highly parametric and procedural, like gears and fasteners. You wouldn't want to design anything else with it though, like a car or a pen or a gun.

I would highly recommend the Joko Engineering series of FreeCAD YouTube videos. I went from being pretty adept at OpenSCAD to getting FreeCAD to "click" by watching this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geSQlBczsWY

After that, I spent a month last year doing a daily household item challenge, which really leveled up my skills and now there's no turning back.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/30DayCADChallenge?f=live

There is also BRLCad which is in the public domain.

Obligatory comment to anything related to parametric 3D modelling: Have a look at [solvespace], which is a GPL3 cross-platform standalone parametric modeller with an awesome hacker-feel.

If you drop by github to look at the code, make sure to check out some of the other awesome projects by @whiteshark (who is one of the authors).

[solvespace]: http://solvespace.com/index.pl

As far as integrated CAD/CAM, I've never seen anything as nice to use as Fusion on the OSS side.

Honestly, I'll just end up paying. It pisses me off that they managed this so poorly, and even more that their pricing tiers include so much BS. Oh well.

Fully agree. SolveSpace is awesome for daily engineering![0]

> make sure to check out some of the other awesome projects by @whiteshark

Typo Fix: @whitequark[1]

[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/SolveSpace-Daily-Engineering

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whitequark

Fusion 360 was the Sketch/Figma answer to SolidWorks/Adobe, and I think it still can be. I’ve seen some absolutely amazing CAM work done in Fusion and I love using it. It’s so easy to get started actually making stuff in it. We’ll see about the limitations but right now they don’t seem too severe.

I figured it was a trap when I bought my 3D printer in 2012 and decided to invest the effort to learn FreeCAD. Free as in freedom, and I continue to donate to their project.

Here's a question for the IP legal crowd

If Autodesk is hiding a design I make using Fusion 360 behind a gate on their cloud, does that require I grant them a license to the IP represented by that design? Who owns the IP, if I create it, but they prevent me from accessing it?

Similar question for a lot of tools that create IP and hide it behind a gate on the cloud. It seems legally shaky.

I use Alibre - specifically Alibre Atom3D. It does everything I need it to do - it was $199 - I own my license. It has STEP, part modeling, assemblies, drawings, the whole 9. It's all parametric. The interface is simple, but it is still powerful. I imagine 99% of what most "hobby" people do can easily be done in that software.

How does the open source and Foss ideology come into the whole "families to feed so they can demand extortion money and DRM and vendor lock in and platoform lock in ?

If blender model can work for them, surely all software can be built on that and I would gladly pay for "maintenance". Monthly but not otherwise.

How have hobbyists historically afforded Autodesk software? I dabbled in 3ds Max back in the day, but I was never under the impression I could justify purchasing it.

Man, I was just getting started in Fusion 360! Bummer!

297/year is not bad, certainly cheaper than a lot of hobby. Is hobby supposed to be cheap/free ?

My concern isn’t over the current price. The larger investment is my time. If I spend hours and hours learning software and creating things with that software, I don’t want to risk it being crippled or the price being raised exorbitantly.

I would rather use open source software or pay for software with a reasonable licensing model (and ideally from a company without a history of consumer-hostile practices).

That is very expensive for hobby software. For contrast, I pay about $50 per year for a Jetbrains IDE for professional use. That's software I feed my family using.

I'm talking about hobby in general. Let say tennis hobby, the annual membership cost alone could easily go more than 297/year.

297/yr isn't the cost of "the hobby". It's the cost of part of the hobby. Then you need machines, bits, and material to work with.

And it's unlikely that a CNC alone will be enough for anything, so there's a bunch of related tools and supplies needed.

It's like saying "a $300 set of clubs isn't too much to have golf as a hobby" but forgetting that you need to pay for all kinds of others stuff, too.

yes, i wasn't implying 297/year is the total cost of "the hobby". thats why i compare it to tennis membership, which is also only the cost of part of the hobby.

That's a limited time offer in light of their recent announcement. The standard price, and indeed the price when you have to renew, is $495 USD (plus applicable taxes).

Sure, but still for many people their hobby expenses could go much higher than that.

(disclaimer: I have only used this software for rock-bottom basic 3D printing)

It seems to me the deeper features make for highly sophisticated and capable (read:valuable) engineering software. At the risk of getting pitchforked, is $25 a month ($300/yr) for an "advanced hobbyist" not ...reasonable? I mean an average cell-phone bill is 4x that.

Of course it is always annoying to get into a subscription model when you only use something infrequently - can you activate it 1 month at a time? Otherwise, if someone is using it often, then 25 bucks a month seems to me a more-or-less a fair value, in the context of status-quo capitalism.

For 2D, LibreCAD is quite serviceable (and very AutoCAD-like).

For 3D there's FreeCAD, but, IMO, while it is nominally quite capable, the UI is so obtuse and inconsistent that after a few hours with it, you'll just pay whatever Autodesk is asking you to pay. That's not to say F360 is great, but FreeCAD is unfortunately much worse. I really wanted to like it, since I don't like my work to be tied to proprietary software, but after digging through it for a week I was back to F360.