Got this email from Autodesk that Fusion is increasing their annual price by a huge amount. I subbed for 1 year a couple years ago for I think $380. Then I was able to get an educational sub after that. Fusion is still the cheapest CAD software out there, not including the free stuff like FreeCAD, but still, this price increase is massive.
It should be noted that it’s still free to use for personal use minus the extra features.
Solidworks (Education version) for US and Canadian Active Duty and Veterans is US $20 or CAD $40 / year.
I am on my 7th or 8th year of it. I don’t use it for making money, but use it for making 3D printed things for around the house, then upload them to Thinginverse and Printables for everyone else to use.
It looks like Solidworks for Makers is US $48 / year.
A couple of answers from the Q&A at the bottom of the page:
“3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers is meant for personal projects and non-commercial use. Per our terms and conditions, you may sell items you make for a profit up to and not exceeding US$2,000 a year. If you are interested in building your business with SOLIDWORKS tools, check out our start up program or our commercial offers.”
“Currently this offer is available for purchase with a billing address within the following countries: Algeria, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. More countries will be added soon.”
“Files and data created with your Maker account are digitally watermarked and can only be opened up in another Maker platform. You cannot open up files created with your Maker account within a commercial or academic platform. This digital watermark is added to native 3D file formats, such as .3dxml, .sldprt, .sldasm, and .slddrw. Neutral 3D file formats, such as .stp or .iges can be opened on any platform.”
Oh wow, thanks for this! I’m a veteran and $20 a year is awesome! I do the same, mostly just making things around the house. I don’t really upload them though, because most things I make are super custom to my needs.
If that’s the case, you don’t need to be paying for Fusion. You should qualify for the free, personal license.
Yeah, I make things for me and family, but you’d be surprised at how many other people would be interested in it as well. I certainly was. I looked at my Thingiverse analytics, and I’ve had 10’s of thousands of downloads of my things. I know those don’t directly translate into prints, but I was shocked at how many people downloaded my designs that were originally just for me to organize my sandpaper, or sift sand or hold my CNC collets and wrenches. . .
Are you familiar with the watermark they are talking about? How does that express itself; does it show up on models or is it like metadata in a file?
I don’t know exactly how it is implemented, but if I had to guess, it is probably just metadata in the file. I know that when I print out the 2D drawings I make, it puts text in the bottom corner with something to the effect of “This was made with the educational version of Solidworks, Not for commercial use” or something like that. I expect something similar if you tried to open a file made on the educational version on the commercial version, there would be something similar on the screen. Not sure though, since I only have the educational version.
It’s a very sticky watermark. If you open and save a file in educational, the watermark cannot be removed even if you open it in paid commercial version later.
I’ve not heard anything good about 3DEXPERIENCE, I really wanted to get it but after reading what other people have said, I decided not to.
I tried it and made a few things for around the house.
It’s fine, but it’s Invasive, and so cloud connected that I got really fed up with it.
I would pay them the same price for an offline only version.
Thanks for the tip, I use SW at work. This would work out well for me.
I use CATIA at work, and it’s funny how both programs are made by Dassault, but have such different interfaces.
Probably bought by Dassaut and developed by different teams
I’ve searched for this and couldn’t find it. They must hide it well. How well does it run on Linux?
Sorry, I don’t have the slightest idea.
Probably not well. Its drm does some weird shit where it (3dexperience) runs in the background and then launches a web page that has you log in and you launch and update from the browser. I think there’s a way to directly launch it with a shortcut but all in all it just does so much weird shit that i haven’t even tried.
I miss Autodesk Inventor but i can’t remotely justify the price for dicking around with personal projects and solidworks for makers is a pretty damn good deal. Plus SW seems like the industry standard so looks better on a resume? I’m a programmer so it doesn’t really matter but meh.
OnShape might be okay, probably runs just fine on Linux, but i hate that its cloud based. I just want to own my software goddamnit.
One day we’ll have a foss parametric non-destructive blender-level cad suite. FreeCAD and OpenSCAD are neat but not really what I’m looking for.
I’m ranting again…
Can’t say you own any 3d cad software anymore anyway since they all went to subscription only about 10 years ago.