
Autodesk Fusion 360 becomes almost useless for hobbyists - oger
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/16/autodesk-announces-major-changes-to-fusion-360-personal-use-license-terms/#comments
======
gorkish
I'm kind of sick of companies punishing personal/hobby/learning users because
another group that should be paying for their software isn't doing it.

This is their problem to solve, and they have chosen to do it this way.

I regret spending effort in learning how to use this platform. I am removing
all my public Fusion360 designs and tutorials and replacing them with
recommendations to others to avoid their software.

Original: Anyone looking to learn CAD probably ought to just jump right to
solidworks as a vendor that is at the very least more predictable and has
better return on your time.

Revision: May have spoken too soon Re: solidworks. _sigh_ I gues if you are a
great software engineer with some free time, have a look at FreeCAD. It needs
some good help.

~~~
dotancohen

      > Anyone looking to learn CAD probably ought to just jump
      > right to solidworks as a vendor that is at the very least
      > more predictable and has better return on your time.
    

I want to teach my daughters the principles of CAD, just as they've learned
the principles of auto repair, Python, camping, and a host of other things.
How am I going to run Solidworks on our Ubuntu home computers? How many
hundreds of dollars does it cost?

I was looking to Autodesk Fusion 360 and even opened a team for our family
recently. I decided on that after looking at FreeCAD, Solvespace, OpenSCAD,
LibreCAD, and a few others, each of which had a fundamental dealbreaker.
Perhaps it will have to be FreeCAD after all.

~~~
phkahler
As someone working on Solvespace, what was the dealbreaker for you? I know it
has shortcomings and different people would give different answers to this
question.

Actually, what are your deal breakers for each of the programs you listed?

~~~
flubert
This issue with Fusion seems like it might be a good opportunity for
Solvespace to get more attention. I know I've looked at Solvespace in the
past, but it has always seemed stagnant, what with the website saying the last
release was in 2016. Since it seems like it is still under development, it
might be a good time to do a v2.3.1 release and update the downloads page,
along with a note that v3.0 is "coming soon".

~~~
phkahler
The intent is to get a 3.0 out soon (by the end of summer already passed). It
will not have the major rework that was originally planned for 3.0 but it is
quite a bit better than 2.3.

------
jwr
I read the limitations carefully. I think only the lack of STEP export is a
showstopper. The rest seems pretty much OK for hobby use.

Also, as a side note, I would be happy to pay a subscription fee, just perhaps
not $499/year, for "advanced hobby use". Autodesk could look more into
separating hobbyists from businesses, I'm sure it's possible.

The problem is that after OnShape went full commercial, this is the only
relatively inexpensive option with history-based parametric modeling.

~~~
AtHeartEngineer
$8-10 a month would be awesome, and they would probably make a ton of money
using that subscription model. It's short sighted that they don't do this.

~~~
dotancohen
For someone like me who would use it for a week, wait two years, then use it
for another week, $8-$10 per month is prohibitory. I would happily pay for
quality software, and I do pay for the Jetbrains tools which I use daily, but
for software that I use very intermittently I need a buy-once-use-forever
model.

~~~
lallysingh
So pay as you use. They already save all your stuff. You just can't have a lot
open at once, IIUC.

~~~
dotancohen
Actually, they don't "save all your stuff". They require "your stuff" to be in
their cloud, with no local download option, and if you do not use the service
for N months, your account is purged.

And I don't care if N is 3 or if N is 36 or if N is 86400. I don't trust a
single storage place for any data I care about. Having it only in their cloud
is absolutely not an option, even if there weren't danger of them deliberately
erasing it if I don't pay regularly.

~~~
lallysingh
Eesh. Man I wish freecad was better. I got my daughter up on F360 in a matter
of minutes (and that was after I used the app myself for about that long).

If they had some $100/yr family maker plan, I'd be all about that. Same for
any reasonable competition.

------
darth_avocado
You paint as a hobby, you buy paint, canvass and brushes. You read as a hobby
you buy books. You bike as a hobby you buy a bike. You use CAD as a hobby you
pay for CAD. Not everything is cheap, some hobbies are expensive, others are
not. Buying books is cheap, buying a bike is not. I'm tired of people talking
about free software as their right. People who make the software also have
families to feed.

~~~
thdrdt
Your comment makes no sense in this context.

The people are not talking about free software as their right. It just sucks
the price went from free to ~$300/y.

We all know Autodesk can do whatever they want. But they created an
expectation by providing free features for years.

All they did is make people loose trust in them.

Most personal users will just move to other free or cheaper software.

~~~
ogre_codes
> Most personal users will just move to other free or cheaper software.

I keep hearing people—who haven't paid for software and encourage others to
not pay—complaining that they will stop using it. What's the downside for
Autodesk here?

~~~
supportlocal4h
Remember when Bill Gates started his new life as a philanthropist by donating
tons of money to schools? Only it wasn't really money. It was lots of Windows
licenses or Office licences that were worth a lot of money. So it arguably
didn't cost Gates anything, but just grew future earnings. He kept all these
students from gaining familiarity with the competition, encouraging them and
their employers to buy licenses later for the product they had learned as a
child.

There's the downside.

------
wlesieutre
I would be so happy if Blender tackled parametric modeling like this.

Tried FreeCAD, gave up in frustration after I drew a second sketch on the face
of an object and no matter what I did it wouldn't extrude.

After that went poorly I'd just picked up Fusion 360 about a month ago and
have been doing pretty well with that. Whoops.

~~~
samwillis
The trouble is that Blender is fundamentally the wrong platform to build a
parametric (solid body) modeller on. Everything in blender is a mesh, whereas
in a parametric solid body modeller everything is a BREP[0]. It would ether
need a new BREP kernel or to include an existing open source BREP kernel, the
most advanced being OpenCASCADE which FreeCAD is built upon. Would love to be
proved wrong though!

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation)
1: [https://www.opencascade.com](https://www.opencascade.com)

~~~
wlesieutre
Blender is _mostly_ meshes, but it can already have other geometry types like
NURBS. You can convert a nurbs object to a mesh, but the modeling process and
data format is totally different. I'm imagining that the solid modeling system
would be a separate mode type like that.

~~~
eloisant
Still, blender is not a CAD tool. It's great to great organic designs
(characters, animals, figurines, etc.) but it's not good for functional parts.
And it will never be, CAD and 3D modeling for organic/art are fundamentally
different.

~~~
KMnO4
I wonder how much work it would be to turn it into a proper CAD tool. I would
donate a significant chunk of my paycheck to Blender if it supported
parametric CAD.

Obviously that would be pocket change to the Blender Foundation, but if enough
people did then maybe it would be worth it. I'd wager there a fairly big group
of people like me who need somewhat decent CAD for hobby use. And if those who
can afford to pay put that money towards Blender, we could make it better
overall for those who can't.

~~~
UncleEntity
> I wonder how much work it would be to turn it into a proper CAD tool.

Never used it myself but there are some CAD tool addons you can try -- also
they seem to have incorporated some 'hard modeling' features which, I would
imagine, aren't that far from the CADiverse.

Also, unless they worked on it (semi)recently, the NURBS in blender is a bit
of a trainwreck which everyone was scared to even look in its direction.

------
sjs382
Well, I guess I'm glad I didn't invest in that Fusion360 course that I had
been eyeing.

$300/year (temporarily discounted from $500) is way too much for "advanced
hobby use". I think $50/year or $100/major version is my limit for hobby
software.

------
detritus
I always though it was a cludgy, bloated piece of software and despite a few
attempts to get into it, never really did.

I particularly disliked having to upload files to their 'cloud' for conversion
between formats or even (if memory serves) for slicing objects. Not really
what I'm comfortable doing with client's assets.

(And i was on acommercial license for a year or two, gifted by them in some
promo as it may have been).

I too echo the sentiment of langitbiru elsewhere in this thread - with the
inflation in the home hobbyist scene over the past few years, I wonder what it
would take for an Affinity-a-like to shake up the domain a little.

I wonder how much Blender could be modded to achieve this?

~~~
bborud
Fusion 360 used to be very buggy. It isn't anymore. Change in speed is harder
to judge since improvements have been very gradual, but the days of waiting
endlessly on processing that can't be interrupted is pretty much over.

According to friends of mine who do fabrication it is a lot more stable than
the high end stuff they have to use which costs an absolute fortune. That
stuff is, apparently, "buggy as f*ck".

I don't think Blender is an option or even a useful starting point for a
replacement. It solves an entirely different problem and any similarity in
problem domain being addressed is purely superficial. (Get a fabrication
professional to take you through their CNC workflow to get an understanding of
how it is used).

The dependence on the cloud sucks for two reasons: Autodesk can make all of
your work go away at any moment and Autodesk have never done much to optimize
uploads/saves so they are slow.

~~~
detritus
For the record, I actually run a CNC and a laser professionally and whilst I'm
not intimately familiar with Blender, I know how other 'non-specific' software
can be modified and/or used as a starting point for creating project files.

It might not perhaps suffice for the creation of a building or a jetplane, but
for _hobbyist_ use, I don't see why not.

For instance - I use Adobe Illustrator as a 2D 'CAD' program, purely because I
find it MUCH quicker to work with than the likes of AutoCAD (which I gave up
on years ago).

I just found Fusion360 incredibly slow. Perhaps things have changed since, but
I last looked at it about 8 months ago.

~~~
bborud
If Illustrator suffices and is "faster" than AutoCAD for your workflow, then
you probably don't actually have a big need for Fusion 360 in the first place.
But there are a lot of people who actually do things where parametric,
constraint based design is quite important for productivity.

~~~
detritus
Again.. _hobbyists_ \- but more to the point, it's perfectly possible to
'manually' do parametric constraints on moderately simple 2.5D geometries on
the fly with a bit of logic using software that isn't necessarily built with
that in mind. It's a cludge, sure, but if Fusion360 slows down 80% of your
workflow where it's not doing much fancy, then that points to there being
somewhere better, perhaps simpler, tools could be used.

-ed

Believe me - I _wanted_ to like Fusion - I had the thing for a while and
tried, but.. meh. It felt like a free product. At best.

------
scrooched_moose
For anyone who has dealt with Autodesk in a professional setting in the last 2
decades, this was 100% expected.

They are an awful company whose entire business model is "the first hit is
free, kids!".

I can get things like limiting cloud storage (if they actually offered offline
storage). But removing .step export? That's just 100% "screw you, now we have
your projects and you can't get them out".

------
andyfleming
Thread from yesterday: Changes to Fusion 360 for Personal Use
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653)

------
roland35
I have been using fusion 360 as a hobbiest for a few years now, and this is
certainly disappointing to see but unfortunately not surprising. I am not a
fan of having online based file management either, but that is how a lot of
these tools extend themselves to be more of a "service" and then get
subscription dollars. Circuit maker by Altium is another example.

One possible alternative is Solid Edge by Siemens- they've had a "community
edition" which is free for hobby and education use. It isn't as popular as
Solid works or Creo but it is a full featured tool. It does have a full
featured price as well of course once you go commerical (these tools are
$5-20k per seat per year generally)

------
mayoff
Inflammatory title, and not the title of the linked article.

As a 3D printing hobbyist who uses F360, I don't see these changes having a
major effect on me or many of the people who post on r/3Dprinting and
r/functionalprint. (I'm not sure they'll have _any_ effect on me.)

------
at_a_remove
TechShop leaned pretty heavily on it. So did a local spinoff group designed to
rise from the (local) ashes of TechShop.

I wonder what will take its place.

------
Ductapemaster
I'm so confused about Autodesk's licensing now. I have an Eagle subscription
at $100 a year and a number a months ago they bundled in F360 with it, which
was a welcome change. But now, F360 alone is $300 a year (and they say it
comes with a free Eagle subscription??). How are there two pricing models?

Am I going to be surprised by a 300% cost increase when my subscription
renews? Are they going to force me to subscribe to F360 to get Eagle?
Thankfully I just renewed, so I won't have to worry about this for at least a
year, but this is frustrating.

------
StillBored
I'm a fusion360 user, mostly for simple 3d printed things. I had already
stopped recommended it to people last year when they started messing with the
hobby/startup license.

Frankly, I would be perfectly willing to toss a couple hundred dollars at them
if it were a boxed product that I "owned" and could reinstall in 10 years. But
they don't offer that, its a rental model or nothing. After all, I paid for
simply3d, despite there being a bunch of free slicers, because it works well
and I can use it for an hour or so a year (because I use it in 5 min bursts)
without fretting over continuous payment.

In the end, I will probably give TurboCad another spin in a year or so when
the next set of fusion360 feature removals happen. I used it a bit a few years
ago and have that copy, and they continue to sell a "permanent" license
version that is fairly reasonably priced. Plus, it looks like they have done a
fair bit of additional work to make it work better for 3d.

For the time being though, I will save off my drawings, and donate some $ to
freecad
[https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate](https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate) to
encourage them.

------
sokoloff
While I'm disappointed in the changes, I both disagree with the
characterization of "almost useless" and with the editorializing that's
inherent in choosing that title for this submission to HN.

The changes are painful (especially the lack of STEP export), but that stops
well short of "almost useless" IMO.

~~~
adammunich
It really is almost useless, there's not really a way to get useful 3D models
out anymore.

~~~
sokoloff
I've used it many dozens of times for 3D printed parts which I expect will
continue to work just fine to export STL files.

It wouldn't surprise me if there are more hobbyist users making STL files for
3D printed parts than all other hobbyist use cases combined. (If you add
2-and-a-half-D CAD/CAM [also still pretty well supported], I'd wager a large
sum that it's still useful for more than half the current hobbyist user base.)

~~~
pbalau
I can go to "Tools -> Make" and the selected body will be sent to my makerboat
desktop app. This means there is a reasonable easy way to add apps to F360
(since I doubt MakerBoat is so big for Autodesk to make a special thing for
them), which means you can export in whatever way you want.

------
crispyambulance
I've been using Fusion 360 for about a year for hobbyist projects. It's been
intuitive, fresh, very capable and the learning curve was long-ish but not
steep. A spacemouse makes it an absolute joy to work with once you get your
motor skills adapted.

~ $300/year is not trivial, but it's more than reasonable if you're using it
for "a lot" of stuff. I would say that 10+ projects in a year is using it a
lot. CAM with FIVE-AXIS milling is a lot, needing to use the cloud for
rendering is a lot. Simulation, generative design and custom extensions are a
lot. If you're doing all of those things, you're definitely on the far edge of
"hobbyist" and should be forking over some money.

~~~
pbalau
True, I'm using it fairly often, but the only thing that affects me from that
list is "Project storage is limited to 10 active and editable documents". And
by that I mean I need to delete the crap I have there, I can survive with 1.

------
katmannthree
There are other free-as-in-beer options but the only ones that don't have a
risk of this happening are the open source packages, of which FreeCAD and
SolveSpace are the only current viable 3D options.

If you need a parametric cad package for small assemblies or occasional use
FreeCAD is most likely workable. I've been using FreeCAD in a light-duty
professional capacity for several years now and will be happy to help out
anyone who wants to transition to it (email is in my profile).

They have a decent tutorials page[0] here for getting started with the basics.

[0]
[https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials](https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials)

------
langitbiru
So we have the cheaper alternatives of Adobe Photoshop which are Affinity
Photo and Gimp.

How hard is to build the equivalent of "Affinity Photo" to Autodesk Fusion
360? Maybe this is a good startup idea.

~~~
cassianoleal
FreeCAD, OpenSCAD are FOSS alternatives.

For "free as in beer" there's OnShape with the caveat that all your projects
in the free tier are public, and that it runs on the browser or via mobile
apps. The iPadOS app has Apple Pencil support which is pretty neat.

~~~
IshKebab
Unfortunately FreeCAD is kind of unusable (in the same way that KiCAD is), and
OpenSCAD isn't an alternative at all.

The only decent FOSS parametric CAD software I've found is SolveSpace, but it
is quite limited, e.g. it doesn't even have a bevel tool, and there's no CAM.
It's pretty much the Notepad of CAD.

CAD is just one of those things that is too complicated and niche for FOSS to
do well.

~~~
jbay808
> CAD is just one of those things that is too complicated and niche for FOSS
> to do well.

It's arguably too complicated for hackers to do well in their spare time, but
there are plenty of FOSS projects in similarly complicated niche areas. The
most successful ones tend to have companies or consortiums backing them, who
aren't looking to make money on the softare itself but have it complement or
support their other activities. OpenModelica for one example.

I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar,
Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative
and get something standard that they can rely on forever. I don't think it
would cost them more than 3rd party software in the long run.

~~~
dotancohen

      > in the long run
    

That's your answer. Seriously.

People have taken the initiative and talked to the engineering departments and
bean counters at large engineering houses (brands you're not familiar with,
that do the engineering for e.g. Ford, etc but not the design which is
typically in-house). The reasons are A) short term cost with no benefit, B)
having to train staff, and C) compatibility with extant files. Not only will
the current staff have to be retrained but nobody can be hired with experience
with the tool.

------
m0zg
For 2D, LibreCAD is quite serviceable (and very AutoCAD-like).

For 3D there's FreeCAD, but, IMO, while it is nominally quite capable, the UI
is so obtuse and inconsistent that after a few hours with it, you'll just pay
whatever Autodesk is asking you to pay. That's not to say F360 is great, but
FreeCAD is unfortunately much worse. I really wanted to like it, since I don't
like my work to be tied to proprietary software, but after digging through it
for a week I was back to F360.

------
dade_
I figured it was a trap when I bought my 3D printer in 2012 and decided to
invest the effort to learn FreeCAD. Free as in freedom, and I continue to
donate to their project.

------
qppo
Here's a question for the IP legal crowd

If Autodesk is hiding a design I make using Fusion 360 behind a gate on their
cloud, does that require I grant them a license to the IP represented by that
design? Who owns the IP, if I create it, but they prevent me from accessing
it?

Similar question for a lot of tools that create IP and hide it behind a gate
on the cloud. It seems legally shaky.

------
Marley_82
I use Alibre - specifically Alibre Atom3D. It does everything I need it to do
- it was $199 - I own my license. It has STEP, part modeling, assemblies,
drawings, the whole 9. It's all parametric. The interface is simple, but it is
still powerful. I imagine 99% of what most "hobby" people do can easily be
done in that software.

------
2Gkashmiri
How does the open source and Foss ideology come into the whole "families to
feed so they can demand extortion money and DRM and vendor lock in and
platoform lock in ?

If blender model can work for them, surely all software can be built on that
and I would gladly pay for "maintenance". Monthly but not otherwise.

------
bleepblorp
Autodesk's behaior in this is no different, morally, from metal theft: an act
that gives a trivial benefit a very small number of people at a massive cost
to many victims.

The amount of money Autodesk's multi-mansion & yacht class of managers will
make from attempting to force hobbyists into paid software rental is trivial
compared to both Autodesk's existing profits and the amount of damage this
will do to the creative capacity of society.

It's a problem that government continues to allow extractive companies, such
as Autodesk, to offer one-sided consumer "contracts" that are binding on
consumers but can be unilaterally and arbitrarily revoked by the issuer.

------
mrkeen
How have hobbyists historically afforded Autodesk software? I dabbled in 3ds
Max back in the day, but I was never under the impression I could justify
purchasing it.

------
jblakey
Man, I was just getting started in Fusion 360! Bummer!

------
matz1
297/year is not bad, certainly cheaper than a lot of hobby. Is hobby supposed
to be cheap/free ?

~~~
dotancohen
That is very expensive for hobby software. For contrast, I pay about $50 per
year for a Jetbrains IDE for professional use. That's software I feed my
family using.

~~~
matz1
I'm talking about hobby in general. Let say tennis hobby, the annual
membership cost alone could easily go more than 297/year.

~~~
wccrawford
297/yr isn't the cost of "the hobby". It's the cost of _part_ of the hobby.
Then you need machines, bits, and material to work with.

And it's unlikely that a CNC alone will be enough for anything, so there's a
bunch of related tools and supplies needed.

It's like saying "a $300 set of clubs isn't too much to have golf as a hobby"
but forgetting that you need to pay for all kinds of others stuff, too.

~~~
matz1
yes, i wasn't implying 297/year is the total cost of "the hobby". thats why i
compare it to tennis membership, which is also only the cost of part of the
hobby.

------
theincredulousk
(disclaimer: I have only used this software for rock-bottom basic 3D printing)

It seems to me the deeper features make for highly sophisticated and capable
(read:valuable) engineering software. At the risk of getting pitchforked, is
$25 a month ($300/yr) for an "advanced hobbyist" not ...reasonable? I mean an
average cell-phone bill is 4x that.

Of course it is always annoying to get into a subscription model when you only
use something infrequently - can you activate it 1 month at a time? Otherwise,
if someone is using it often, then 25 bucks a month seems to me a more-or-less
a fair value, in the context of status-quo capitalism.

