I'm beginning to wonder how long before all that's left is the advertising.
It's taken you this long to figure that?
It's Autodesk. They're not in the business of giving people free stuff - their core is to sell expensive stuff. The only reason they let you have this for nowt is because that's the only way to get new bums on seats. It's a well-trodden path, particularly with complex products where there is a learning curve - get them hooked with low- or zero-cost versions and then force them to upgrade once they are locked in. Microsoft achieved this by turning a blind eye to pirated Word, so despite stuff like Ami being superior they got the eyeballs. When a business buts new stuff, what their users already know has the foot in the door, and the rest is history.
Here, they want your muscle memory to favour their tools, and all your documents locked into their format. The longer you stick with them the harder it will be to break away...
The surprise here is not that Autodesk are turning the screws but that apparently no-one saw it coming.
We all saw it coming. We're not stupid; we're engineers FFS.
Well, see, that's the crazy thing. All over this forum I see engineers (or maybe they're hobbyists pretending to be engineers) who are always looking for ways to "hack" a product to get a "free" upgrade (see the endless Rigol and Siglent threads) or looking for cheap clones of products. "Oh, the Saelae logic analyzer is too expensive, fuck them, I'll use the clone." So if you're an engineer, you should understand how product pricing works and why the Saelae is more expensive.
I wonder how many of these engineers expect customers to pay their asking price for their products.
I wonder how many of these engineers decry Chinese cloners when it comes to
their products.
But there's a difference between "turning the screws" and making your introductory product useless for its primary purpose, thereby driving those who might be willing to give you money for it turn away in disgust. AutoDouche aren't just stepping over that line, they're moving the line to the edge of a cliff and jumping over it.
Given what it has to offer now I certainly wouldn't give them more than $50 for it, and "Not only no, but hell NO!" to their moronic subscription-only business model.
To be honest, I'm surprised that their free version has persisted as long as it has. How does a company pay its engineers if a very usable version of its product is free?
Sure, it's just "software," and "software wants to be free," but unless you work for free and don't want anyone to pay you for your designs, then surely you see that software development is
not just handwaving and magic. It's real work.
I'll continue using the free version to make plastic toys and spacers/cribbing blocks/bushings to print on my 3DP; that's exactly what it's good for. Any further drafting work will be done in some other environment, and I will take the skills I learned on F360 elsewhere, giving AD $0 for that education. That's exactly what their business model is worth.
Please report back and say which environment you've chosen, and whether it's as efficient as F360 or as easy to learn and use, and we'll all switch to it en masse and show those fuckers at Autodesk that we think they suck!
I mean -- yeah, I use Kicad and it's an excellent piece of work regardless of its cost. I hope that their Kicad Services thing enables the developers to make a living doing it. I started using it several years ago (during the run-up to the 4.0 release) because I needed to design some boards and my Ultiboard license was showing its age. Altium then as now was way more expensive than I could justify. The only real option was EAGLE. And I looked at EAGLE, and considered springing the $1000 or whatever for the unlimited license, but hot damn that program was a mess. The libraries system stinks, the user interface was designed by dingbats and the only reason it ever got any traction was because they had a very limited free version that all of the Open Source Hardware weenies jumped on. (I should note that I looked at gEDA back then and that package sucks in every way.) To be fair, the recent price drop in OrCAD makes that look attractive, but see, Kicad is eminently usable.
Can FreeCAD become to 3D design what Kicad is to PCB design? Sure, yeah, if the developers had vision. And income. Right now, FreeCAD is a toy, it has been a toy for several years now, and I don't see evidence that it will be anything but a toy.
All of this is to say that I'll probably end up springing the $300/yr for the "startup" or "personal" or whateverfuck version of F360. Why? Because it works.