This is going to be great!
http://www.onshape.com/
There is a free version (no. doc limited only)
http://www.onshape.com
How about: BECAUSE NOBODY WANTS TO RENT 3D CAD SOFTWARE…
Sounds good. But if you upgrade from free to paid, it’s gonna cost you 1200 bucks a year and that’s s lot!
How is this different than managing licenses or paying for software upgrades. Enough with the cloudification of everything. The last thing I want is a CAD on my freaking phone. Yay! I can work on the train ! NOT.
@Shachar_Weis , as soon as you stop paying, your software gets taken away. If I wanted to pay $1200 for the software, and use it for 5 years, I could. With this model, I pay $1200…and then when I stop paying, no more software.
I think the $1200/year is meant to be for people who need CAD fairly continuously for years on end. For hobbyists, the free version is probably adequate. I haven’t fully familiarized myself with the limitations of the free one yet, but it looks like you basically get five “documents” which can be assemblies of arbitrary complexity, and no other limitation.
There are some things to really like about it though. The document and version control looks almost like they just integrated Github. Concurrent editing and sharing to customers looks slick. Some of the assembly tools look really nice too. The “direct editing” tools demo nicely, but I have my doubts. I applied for an invite, but the open beta filled up pretty much immediately.
The yearly cost is comparable to SolidWorks, but without the $5k initial buy. The capabilities are… different. I couldn’t use it for work yet, but in a couple years, maybe. For a collaborative hobby project, it could be awesome.
However, if I can’t migrate my data out of it in an orderly fashion before cancelling a subscription, that could indeed be a problem.
This is from John Hirschtick, who founded SolidWorks. He’s in it for the money, so hobbyists are not targeted, businesses are. According to the Features & Pricing page, Onshape can export to native SolidWorks format. If it really can, it would be the first parametric CAD program to export to a competing product’s file format while keeping the history tree. Since they got a lot of former SolidWorks software engineers in their team, I guess it is doable. Dassault Systèmes must be pissed right now!
@ThantiK this is exactly the software industry’s wet dream. A stable revenue stream from captive customers. This is happening even though you and I hate it. Let’s hope it runs its course as quickly as possible.
If I had that sort of money to spend on CAD a year I’d sponsor a FreeCAD programmer to get some of the features we all want coded.
I’ve posted this because of the (supposedly) free unlimited (features, not DOCs!) version. As most of us have paid jobs and (should) understand were the money came from, I think we shouldn’t demonize a company for trying to make money. At least they haven’t rip off anyone’s ideas, I guess… As for the cost, I cant’ complain for something I can’t pay, or won’t pay. Their real (paying) costumers will decide the cost benefit over the current offers. As final note I’m not related in any ways with this company.
When I look at what Adobe and Microsoft can give me for a monthly fee their costs look very high.