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Fusion360 Price Hike

CarterKraft said:
IMO the problem is for the CAM portion you are then beholden to F360...
I like the idea I own the cam piece of the puzzle, I won't have to learn a new platform for the foreseeable future.

Fusion could stop free cam tomorrow then you are over a barrel.
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100% agreed. I like how I can import custom post processors into fusion, but if it becomes a paid feature, yeah, I'll move on to something else. I learned fusion coming from sketchup, so I'm sure I can learn anything else with time. For now I'm familiar with it and it works well for my use cases.
 
A bit of an update on this issue - this crossed my desk this morning: The End of AutoCAD Multiuser (Network) Licenses?—ARES Flexible CAD Licenses May Be Your Answer

TLDR: AutoDesk is eliminating network licenses for AutoCAD. This means you have one license per user instead of being able to share a license between multiple users. I know it is AutoCAD and not Fusion360, but it could be setting a trend for AutoDesk in general.

At the Shop, there are 3.5 people who make use of Fusion360. Three who actually design and then the manager's (one of the 3) wife uses it a little bit for 3D printing stuff (the 0.5). All of us use it after hours at times for personal projects. None of us use it full time like the design department of a larger company where you have people just sitting in front of the computer all day. I may be given a project and work on designing that and getting it ready for production for a day or a week and then not use it at all for a couple weeks - or months. Same with the others. It's basically on four computers and any of us can log in to the license if nobody else is using it.

Eliminating network licenses would mean we'd need four licenses instead of one. And (for the sake of argument) if you say that one license is actually in use about 25% of the time, now there would be four licenses that would only be in use somewhat over 5% of the time each. That's great for AutoDesk, but (obviously) sucks for the users.

The article makes the case for Graebert as an alternative to AutoCAD. I really have no familiarity with Graebert, but I think this will likely push alternatives to AutoDesk products in general. After Adobe went subscription only, I made the move from Creative Suite to Affinity's Suite: Creative Software For Professionals | We Are Affinity

Most of what I used was Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and InDesign. Like Fusion360, none of them were daily use for me. Creative Cloud is $60 a month or $89 a month for those four individually. Affinity's Suite of Photo, Designer, and Publisher is $165 for a perpetual license and they have sales for 30% to 50% off a couple times a year (Black Friday is coming up). I added a PDF editor with a lifetime license as well. So for the cost of a couple months of Creative Cloud, I have everything I need for as long as I want.

Likewise, LibreOffice offers me everything I need instead of paying $10 a month ($100/year) for Microsoft 365: Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft

By the way, there is LibreCAD, but I can't say it offers enough to make it a primary choice: LibreCAD - Free Open Source 2D CAD

In general, hopefully AutoDesk's move to squeeze as much out of people as they can will push others to develop alternatives.
 
dnsfailure said:
what about OnShape? I use that anytime I need to do any CAD work.
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I still use it and am really happy with it for my skill level.

Asuch as I thought I would hate it the freedom of the cloud based system is really awesome.

I can work on my company owned laptop, jump on my personal laptop and ultimately finish the design and create a DXF on my plasma tables PC running Linux, ultimate freedom.
 
I am going to retry free cad now that I am much more on shape savvy.

It would be nice to have a locally "owned" platform that would be isolated from corporate overloads.
 
dnsfailure said:
what about OnShape? I use that anytime I need to do any CAD work.
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I haven't really looked into it deeply. The two things stopping me are that it shows the free version has public storage (Does that mean anyone can access your files? Can they only read them or can they change them too?) and to make the next step (and get private storage) is $1500 a year. Also, am I correct that you use a browser for OnShape? It isn't a program you download locally (like Fusion360)? The Shop has horrible connectivity and even Fusion360 has issues when you lose connection, so trying to work "in the cloud" would be a nightmare for us.
 
PAToyota said:
I haven't really looked into it deeply. The two things stopping me are that it shows the free version has public storage (Does that mean anyone can access your files? Can they only read them or can they change them too?) and to make the next step (and get private storage) is $1500 a year. Also, am I correct that you use a browser for OnShape? It isn't a program you download locally (like Fusion360)? The Shop has horrible connectivity and even Fusion360 has issues when you lose connection, so trying to work "in the cloud" would be a nightmare for us.
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The files are public, when you open one you get a copy, your doc cannot be modified.

IMO this might be an issue for patent scalping etc. If you are really building something worth $.

Since I can seemingly create unlimited documents I just spread shit out and use a non obvious file naming structure so a guy can't search "f150 motor mount" as an example.

Obviously I'd prefer a secured solution but at my current level of success I don't really care if someone downloads my file for a too large radiator shroud in a 1982 elcamino.
 
CarterKraft said:
I am going to retry free cad now that I am much more on shape savvy.

It would be nice to have a locally "owned" platform that would be isolated from corporate overloads.
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I downloaded freecad a few weeks ago. It's not as intuitive as I'd hoped it would be. I need to spend a couple hours and find some good tutorials to see if it clicks like Fusion did.
 
Are you identified and can someone search for files by someone? So can I search for files by "CarterKraft" (for example) and then say "Hey, these three files look like a too large radiator shroud for a 1982 ElCamino I could use!"

I have mixed feelings about others being able to access my files. The Shop would definitely need a professional account - at which point it would be about 3x the cost of Fusion360. But for my own files, most of it is like your stuff - if someone wants to cut out a janky bracket from my file they're welcome to it. Other things that I've put time into, I don't feel as good about having anyone just use it after all the time I put into it - or (like AlxJ64 said elsewhere) have them start selling it online.
 
PAToyota said:
Are you identified and can someone search for files by someone? So can I search for files by "CarterKraft" (for example) and then say "Hey, these three files look like a too large radiator shroud for a 1982 ElCamino I could use!"

I have mixed feelings about others being able to access my files. The Shop would definitely need a professional account - at which point it would be about 3x the cost of Fusion360. But for my own files, most of it is like your stuff - if someone wants to cut out a janky bracket from my file they're welcome to it. Other things that I've put time into, I don't feel as good about having anyone just use it after all the time I put into it - or (like AlxJ64 said elsewhere) have them start selling it online.
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I'm.nit sure to be honest, when I searched in the past it was for specific items.

Example was din rail mountable wago splice mounts. Found a gaggle of them in a dudes 3D printer design that I liked.

If I was you I'd just make an account and see what you think.

It is really surprising that OnShape would be 3x more expensive than F360?
 
CarterKraft said:
It is really surprising that OnShape would be 3x more expensive than F360?
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I guess regular prices ($680 to $1500) it's closer to 2x, but with the current 30% discount ($476) Fusion360 is about a third the price.

That might not be a straight up comparison, though, as I don't know what is included in OnShape with the Free and Standard Plans compared to Fusion360's Free and Paid plans - and then the Fusion360 extensions.

OnShape.png


Fusion360.png
 
I use CAMBAM to drive my little CNC mill. It's been 15 years and it's great. Only 2.5D though with some surfacing. Buy once and get lifetime updates.

I design in solidworks (2009 - I refuse to pay to upgrade) and export as DXF which I pull into CAMBAM to define regions and paths. There are so many free or cheap and open source 3D modellers now that I think solidworks/autodesk have to be struggling for converts.
 
I use solidworks student for 50 bucks a year. I used my personal email and put n/a for my school and it let me get it. It is also the full version with fea and all that fun stuff. Everything is watermarked.

They also have a makers version, which is about 50 bucks a year. It is a little weird since it makes you go through the website but it is the full version of solidworks on your desktop. Once you go though the website once it works through your desktop, and is the same. Everything is also watermarked but you get some freedom when it comes to selling stuff.
 
LScout800 said:
I use solidworks student for 50 bucks a year. I used my personal email and put n/a for my school and it let me get it. It is also the full version with fea and all that fun stuff. Everything is watermarked.

They also have a makers version, which is about 50 bucks a year. It is a little weird since it makes you go through the website but it is the full version of solidworks on your desktop. Once you go though the website once it works through your desktop, and is the same. Everything is also watermarked but you get some freedom when it comes to selling stuff.
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The watermarks stay with every file produced on the student version. If you have one file in a whole assembly that was created on a student version but opened in a legit version it still watermarks the whole damn thing.

I ended up recreating from scratch several models I still had from back in uni days. Others I exported as parasolids and imported back in just to stop the damn watermarks.
 
PAToyota said:
I can see the watermark being an issue if you send the file out to anyone else, but do they create any issues if everything you do is internal?
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I send stuff to send cut send or import to fusion for my plasma table. Never been an issue. On my baja team at school we send watermarked drawings out to manufactures all the time with no issues.

Now the watermark will screw up parts you drop into an assembly made with the full version, and parts saved in the makers version cannot be opened using any other solidworks lisence, but for designing parts for your rig it is fine.

Also if you have a 3D scanner fusion has some pretty cool reverse engineering tools that make turning scans into usable models pretty easy, still have yet to find another platform that offers that kind of funcionality for less than what the full price of fusion costs. Anyone know of any?
 
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