
Changes to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - andyfleming
https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/changes-to-fusion-360-for-personal-use/
======
raynr
Wow, I did not expect this. I started looking at Fusion 360 a couple years
back because it seemed very hobbyist friendly, and while I primarily use it
for 3d printing, I've dabbled in laser cutting and CNC too.

I always had the impression that Autodesk had positioned Fusion 360 as their
gateway drug into AutoCAD or some other Autodesk software, but that it was
remarkably full featured for that purpose.

Last year (or was it the year before?), they added some restrictions to their
free version. No biggie, I thought. Most of the cool hobbyist functionalities
remained intact.

Now, they have taken more away. The file export limitations in particular are
crippling. No .step? .dxf? No extensions??? I can't even buy stress simulation
credits?

...yikes.

US$495 a year to subscribe to the "full" version (they have "generously"
granted a 40% discount until Oct, hurry before it's too late!). No cheap
versions for hobbyists like me who just like to dabble and for whom a yearly
sub is out of the budget.

Any suggestions for free/cheap and functional local-install alternatives to
Fusion 360? Parametric modelling has really saved my butt, and motion joint
functionality is very useful too.

~~~
KeepFlying
While not as capable and well supported as Fusion, the two top alternatives
that I am aware of are: [https://www.openscad.org/](https://www.openscad.org/)
and [https://www.freecadweb.org/](https://www.freecadweb.org/)

With FreeCAD being closer to Fusion than OpenSCAD.

~~~
phkahler
Give SolveSpace a try too.

~~~
nraynaud
I don't think solvespace has any offset or minkowski sum operation, it's a
staple of mechanical modelling.

------
sbuk
No surprises. For all the arguments around FAANG and user hostility, Autodesk
are the absolute pits. They have been price gouging for decades. They release
buggy software and hold various industries hostage with their pricing. For an
Architect with 100 users of Revit as an example, the fees are eye watering,
and the support 'contract' is always with 3rd parties, which is invariably
extremely limited. Horrible organisation.

~~~
agumonkey
wait until blender eat their lunch

~~~
mediaman
Blender is not currently a parametric modeler. I think there is some effort to
add some parametric functionality, but it is a loooooooong ways away from that
as it's a complicated feature set.

Though it would be wonderful if Blender was eventually able to add this. It is
probably not currently a priority for their financial sponsors though -
CGI/game industry doesn't use parametric much.

~~~
agumonkey
Blender was barely a speckle on the map when it started it's now very capable.
I'd bet 10$ it could grow a parametric whatever in 12 months

~~~
dotancohen
I'll take that bet. You've got $10 if stock Blender supports parametric
modeling on 18 September, 2021. You are invited to email me at my HN username
@ gmail.com

------
qchris
I've always found it a little surprising that companies haven't built/funded a
open-source organization for parametric mechanical CAD, similar to Blender for
games or KiCad for electronics/PCB design.

The upside for a ROI seems like it would be enormous, and pretty easy to make
happen. Industrial seat licensing for products like Solidworks, CATIA,
Inventor, and (now) Fusion are enormously expensive. It's not just private
organizations either--CAD proficiency is such a basic skill that every serious
engineering school has an organizational license for their students too, which
I'd imagine also costs a bundle. It's not as if the tools themselves are
expanding functionality at some sort of rapid rate, either; I haven't done
much CAD in the last two years (so maybe I somehow missed some sort of feature
explosion), but while a regular user between 2013-2018, I saw basically no
change in the vast majority of my most-used tools for several different CAD
programs, with the exception of some improvement in out-of-the-box simulation
capability.

The existing FOSS alternatives just aren't at par. I've tried FreeCAD,
OpenSCAD, etc., and most mechanical engineers/CAD specialists wouldn't touch a
code-based editor. They're certainly better than before, but the rough edges
exist and some of them appear in areas that need to Just Work (like assembly
and drawings). From my understanding of their contribution graphs, private
organizations putting even two or three full-time developers working on those
projects could push them much, much closer to being a drop-in replacement for
a lot work that gets done, and potentially even save those orgs some money in
the short-term by reducing the total number of seat licenses they need in to
function.

Edit: Added mention of KiCad, bc that's kind of important too

~~~
myself248
I think the tipping point for KiCad was when CERN realized how much they were
spending on professional EDA licenses, and decided to pour those resources
into improving KiCad instead. That's how I understood it, anyway.

I suppose some large-ish entity that relies on CAD will need to take the same
view. I have less faith in academia there, however -- I suspect many of those
sitewide licenses are heavily discounted in order to cultivate the addiction,
to profit from it later. That's just speculation, though.

This is where we really need good software bounties. I'm sure a whole lot of
scorned F360 users would throw a few bucks a month into a Patreon or something
to advance the state of FreeCAD. I'm not even directly impacted by this; I
have a F360 license through my employer, but I'm offended enough on principle
to contribute if there's a place to do so.

~~~
redis_mlc
> when CERN realized how much they were spending on professional EDA licenses

I've worked in national labs, and the bigger concern is how to guarantee the
ability to open or update the current files in one or two decades.

(It was common to see foot-high printouts that faded over the years and became
illegibile, to give an example of the time scale we're talking about.)

Hobbyists have a similar problem in that they want to be able to "hibernate" a
project and update drawings in 5 years, but without thinking about monthly
cloud fees. So free or perpetual licenses also make more sense for that use
case.

Storing drawing files long-term in a vendor's cloud is undesirable if you
really want local files for archival or distribution purposes.

------
JeremyHerrman
It's a shame that Autodesk is cutting back on features for free personal use,
especially the removal of STEP export (an open interchange format) and multi-
axis CAM (used to convert 3D models into instructions for milling machines &
lathes).

But - $495 for a CAD program as fully featured as Fusion 360 is a steal
compared to $$$$ Solidworks & competitors. Plus it's cross platform which you
don't typically find in the world of CAD.

Is FreeCAD a viable alternative? Not even close.

Should there be a usable FOSS CAD program? hell yes!

Unfortunately the FOSS foundations required to build a real CAD program
haven't materialized in cohesive way. There are so many pieces, with many
requiring teams of PhDs to produce: CAD kernels, constraint solvers, file
format interop, sketching tools, assembly support (mating), simulation, etc...
There are some advanced projects out there like the OPENCASCADE kernel, but
Parasolid is more reliable and has real support through Siemens.

------
lsllc
Ugh. AutoDesk (sort-of) did this with Eagle (PCB design) when they acquired it
-- in that case it drove me to learn KiCAD which in the end was what I needed
to do! (and I think the AutoDesk acquisition of Eagle also invigorated
interest and spurred development of KiCAD!).

I recently got a 3D Printer and have been learning Fusion360 and designing my
first parts. Guess I'll take another look at FreeCAD.

In general, I'm happy to pay for things that "have value", but the pricing
here ($495/year) is just too much to justify for a hobby.

~~~
phkahler
>> I recently got a 3D Printer and have been learning Fusion360 and designing
my first parts. Guess I'll take another look at FreeCAD.

Also have a look at SolveSpace. Version 3.0 is nearing completion but if you
can build from source or use the snap store you can use it now:

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

[https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace](https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace)

There are also a few great YouTube channels with tutorials:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEvJVXu3VfGMSOdpA0jrG...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEvJVXu3VfGMSOdpA0jrGRzoM7NlNOl5s)

------
GistNoesis
I only use fusion as a slicer to generate the tool-path for my MPCNC. The
high-speed machining is great to allow to mill some harder materials without
breaking the drill bits.

Removing the rapid movement seems like a petty move.

Removing the simulation is fine for me if that's not the simulation of the
manufacturing operations which is absolute necessity.

Hopefully that move will help some slicer like Cura expand and do some CAM
code, because up until now there was no need to develop because Fusion was
really good and was free.

------
ironmagma
This is a great example in how not to write an announcement to your customers.
Start with positive language, deliver a huge blow, make no apology.

~~~
coldelectrons
Introduce yourself. Establish a connection or rapport with the audience. Set
expectations.

"My name is Inigo Montoya..."

~~~
ironmagma
The expectations that the blog sets up are in the positive mood. It should
really start off with, "This is going to really suck, everyone, and in fact it
might be the worst thing you heard about this year. Just kidding, it's
slightly better, but...". But instead it builds up positive expectations.
Anyone sufficiently jaded just has to fight the urge to believe this fluff
while desperately scanning to find the place where they tear it all down and
tell you what is happening with the product, after needlessly building up for
paragraphs at a time.

------
codazoda
I just uninstalled and wrote "fusion 360 hobby announcement" as the reason.
I'm just a hobby user, so I don't have time to figure if/when I'll run into
their new limitations. Just removed it and I'll go learn FreeCAD or something
similar. I also use OpenSCAD where applicable.

------
eindiran
Does anyone have a recommendation for a FOSS alternative to Fusion 360 that is
(1) reasonably popular and (2) has a similar feature set?

~~~
avhon1
Solvespace has the parametric modeling and mill toolpath generation, but not
the rest. FreeCad is closer to, but still far from, feature parity, and has a
very different UI.

~~~
flubert
Is Solvespace so mature that it doesn't need updates? I see the last release
was in 2016.

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

~~~
zokier
3.0 release seems pretty close

[https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/552#issuecom...](https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/552#issuecomment-647863315)

[https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/milestone/2](https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/milestone/2)

------
dekhn
I spent enough time in FreeCAD to become really proficient. It's not as
refined as F360, it lacks a number of features, but the latest version (0.19)
is fairly mature. I've designed and built full assemblies with gears, and then
printed or CNC'd it (FreeCAD has some support for CNC toolpathing).

I've tried F360 a few times and each time dropped it thinking "this is
designed to lock me in and make me pay for it".

------
neetdeth
I think they're deliberately trying to shed personal users because the
hobbyist association is brand poison for Fusion in the professional space.

The people Autodesk wants to sell subscriptions to sneer at the "hackerspace"
types and scoff at Fusion 360.

------
DivisionSol
Saw this come a mile away when they started jacking up the subscription cost
for hobbyist licenses (~late 2019 according to my emails.) Instead of being an
on-ramp for their serious offerings, it was just too good and needed to be
hooked up to a milker.

------
OJFord
These restrictions seem fairly reasonable to me, most cause for concern would
be further future restrictions I suppose. No generative design at all is a bit
of a shame though, people do play with that ('needlessly') for hobby 3D
prints.

Odd that it doesn't mention _small_ businesses though - wasn't it previously
personal or <100k USD pa?

But also.. why? If it's already personal use only, and someone has an
automatic tool changer for their personal use CNC mill, why _not_ let them use
it? Get hooked on it? Continue to want to use it when they have a saleable
product idea?

~~~
marshray
Fair to assume the 'hobbyist' license was being used in large scale production
in cultures where people are comfortable being dishonest about such things.

~~~
OJFord
But what does this really change in that regard? Some industries could no
longer do that because they rely on generative modelling or ATC?

But designers of small PCBs (whatever their worth) or people 3D printing can
continue unimpeded?

And I'm sure ATC can be added back in as a post-process, since it must at
least stop for a manual tool change, or its CAM would be useless for even
hobbyists.

~~~
masterj
> And I'm sure ATC can be added back in as a post-process, since it must at
> least stop for a manual tool change, or its CAM would be useless for even
> hobbyists

I believe ATC moves are implemented as macros by the machine. So the code
emitted looks like:

M6 T2

and the ATC behavior is filled in with a macro for the specific machine.

To nerf ATC users, Fusion is preventing toolpaths with multiple tools from
being exported in the first place. So you have to generate individual
toolpaths for each tool.

The sad part is that hobby machines also make use of the "M6 T<tool number>"
macros to move the machine to a place where it's easy to change tools and then
do automatic touch-off before continuing. It's not only professional-class
machines that will be affected.

It should be theoretically possible to run the multiple generated files
through a script to put them back together, but this is likely too much
complexity for the vast majority of users.

~~~
OJFord
> Fusion is preventing toolpaths with multiple tools from being exported in
> the first place. So you have to generate individual toolpaths for each tool.

Oh that's a shame, I'd assumed it would use the 'compulsory stop' code, so no
ATC, but allowing the opetator to. I hadn't considered that non-ATC machines
might do something helpful with ATC codes. (I don't have, but have recently
become interested in having, a CNC mill or anything.)

------
superkuh
This is what happens when you use desktop applications that live in other
people's computer's instead of yours.

~~~
gregschlom
That's silly, any desktop app can implement a license check mechanism and
decide not to run anymore, even though it's 100% located on "your computer".

The real lesson here is: that's what happens when you use software that's free
as in beer.

~~~
superkuh
Sure, they _can_ , but most don't because it's obviously a jerk move to
require periodic (bi-weekly) internet access when your application doesn't
require internet access in the first place.

~~~
bsder
You've never run FlexLM, have you?

------
bitxbit
Am I the only one who thought Autodesk was very generous with Fusion 360 for
years? It was basically the best software for hobbyist and it was offered for
FREE.

~~~
marshray
'Generous' implies an act of benevolence.

A bait-and-switch scheme is anything but.

~~~
jackhack
indeed.

I'm sure the deer congregating at the corn feeder feel the same way, at least
until opening day of hunting season.

And the Turkey must think "The farmer must love me. He feeds me and tends to
my needs. Why look at the calendar, with Thanksgiving day just around the
corner..."

~~~
aequitas
The difference is the deer and turkey don't get to read and accept the ToS.
Autodesk seems clear about what you sign up for[0] (1 year, non-commercial
licence). You're choice to accept the terms and risk not being able to use
this professional software for free.

[0]
[https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/personal](https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/personal)

------
solarkraft
It's a great time to learn FreeCAD!

It's a lot more user friendly than it used to be and still rapidly improving.

------
nickthegreek
The export filetype and 2d drawing limitations are sad.

~~~
jrockway
They have always been jerks about filetype export. I have tried and failed to
export .obj files for other 3D software many times. They really want to use
some cloud process, and it never works.

I wrote a script that imports STLs into Blender and saves them as OBJs. No
cloud required! Works every time! Wow!

~~~
marshray
Support for extensions (scripts) is one of the things banned by the hobbyist
license.

~~~
jrockway
Oh, I mean I save the thing as an STL and then run a Python program on the
commandline to do the conversion. I didn't even know that there was a
provision for making that even easier.

It is unfortunate when I read the list of things they are doing to make the
life of a hobbyist harder, because Fusion 360 has been pretty useful to me.
They should just make it something you buy for $50. Would instantly pay.

------
adfm
FreeCAD is pretty cool and there are plenty of other great FOSS CAD/CAM tools
worthy of mention. Is there something similar to the Blender Foundation geared
towards CAD/CAM?

There are some great non-SaaS tools out there if you're willing to spend a
little money. Rhino 3D is one stand-out in this space. And if you're looking
for a decent CAM solution, check out Estlcam. It's a stand alone tool with a
ton of great features at a reasonable price.

------
krschultz
It's still significantly less expensive than OnShape, which seems like its
closest competitor. Unfortunately it's hard to actually differentiate between
"hobbyist" and "small company" without cutting some really critical features.
Most people, even professionals, just don't use that much of the overall
feature set.

------
chromaton
This sucks. As I saw this news, I'm in the middle of writing up a tutorial
involving exporting 2D files from Fusion 360.

~~~
chromaton
Update from the FAQ: "You can still export DXFs, but only from a sketch. To do
this, you’ll need to right click on the sketch in the browser and choose ‘Save
as DXF. For more information, review How to Save Sketch as a DXF."

Fortunately for me, this is exactly what I'm writing up.

------
dplgk
So the only hobby competitor (barely) is SketchUp which was acquired and is
just being squeezed for profit while adding no new features, lacking MANY
needed features and being quite buggy with terrible UX. So Auto desk pretty
much has their hobby users in a corner.

------
GekkePrutser
It's a shame they discontinued 123D design. I loved that for simple 3d
printing projects and still use it.

For more complex stuff I used inventor fusion which was a free beta but I
think this is now part of 360.

I still have to get into it as 123D is still sufficient for me :)

------
megiddo
Ugh. I literally just bought a second GPU for IOMMU for this application.

Fuck it, FreeCAD!

------
dazhbog
On the path to solidworkification..

------
darth_avocado
There's only negative comments on the thread, but what most people missing
here is software development takes resources. Heck, just keeping an online
product alive costs money (check GCP/AWS pricing). A software engineer in the
Bay Area costs $200k/year on an average. If you want to hire quality
engineers, it takes a lot more.

They're not blocking it behind a paywall. It's still free. I understand that
for hobbyists, it can be expensive. But if you are using things beyond the
free tier, that's more than just a hobby. And I know this is an unpopular
opinion, but being a Software Engineer, I really hate it when anytime a
software company tries to charge for things, it's unfair and it's price
gouging. But people fail to acknowledge that it is the only industry where you
can even pick things up as a hobby for free. Literally anything else you want
to pick up as a hobby costs money upfront. If all of the 645,000 users were
willing to put up with those upfront costs, they wouldn't have had the need to
price their plans so high.

~~~
jfim
When reading through the comments, it's mentioned that one of the reasons for
the license change is because of people abusing the free hobbyist license:

> [...] as talked about in the announcement, we did not make these decisions
> lightly, but it is necessary in order for us to continue support Fusion 360
> for Personal Use as a free offering, cut down on abuse of the license type,
> and continue to develop advanced capabilities.

The issue of charging from the software is distinct from the issue of
enforcing the requirement that the license is for non-commercial purposes.
Even if they had a low cost hobbyist license with all the features unlocked,
the people currently using the hobbyist license for commercial purposes would
just use the inexpensive one as opposed to paying for the full commercial one.

Autodesk could've taken the approach of sending sternly worded letters to
commercial users using the hobbyist license, or even deactivating commercial
users with the wrong license type, since their software is partly cloud-based
and requires an Autodesk account and internet connection. Instead, they've
taken the approach of changing the feature set, which is why some people are
annoyed.

~~~
GekkePrutser
I kinda see where they're coming from though. The account of times I've seen a
business user carelessly closing the "please play fair" box of TeamViewer...
And I'm not talking small businesses either.

