I am currently having nightmares about adaptives with no rapids…
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I have used Fusion sometimes more then 48 hours in a row lol, more then most on here for sure. I am paying the 800 for a 3 year. I think less then a dollar a day is fair for my usage amount, even if it is only to keep a few stupid options. Love the program and I am not mad at the price, but I think this is a PR disaster for Autodesk and it should have been handled way better.
They should have just came up with very attractive upgrades and offer a pay version that includes them, instead of maliciously taking away basic functionality to force a subscription. That is dirty business!
If this leads to a bigger budget for more advanced development that would be a big plus side. Also if they are in dire financial straits like so many others due to Pandemic, they might need this to survive?
I do feel weird plugging away on the worlds most hated software (At the moment), and up until a couple days ago I was enthusiastically telling everyone to learn Fusion! Doh!
Did I read correctly they are adding features for paid subscription? Advanced tool path options that were not available before on the free version?
I paid $150 for the Worldcraft Quake engine editor in 1996. I remember pausing between any adjustments on the map for 60 seconds waiting for my top of the line Pentium Pro 200 MHZ with 16 megs of ram to calculate. It had 1/100th of the functionality of Fusion.
We have come a long way!
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The sad thing is the business people that made these decisions are often times not stupid. They know the repercussions of their actions still justify it in some way or another. Fusion is still great for free software, let’s just hope the business managers don’t cripple it too much that make it unusable. I still think $10-$15/mo is totally reasonable for Fusion and I would pay that in a second but $25+/mo is starting to get pricey for someone that makes very little off this hobby.
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Off topic a little - I am novice Fusion user, but use it daily as a professional tool. I don’t believe I actually make any money with it, quite the opposite really. Designing, programming, and extracting some semblance of a professional result from a Shapeoko, all costs me considerable time. I cant bill for this time. Had it been a paid offering, I am not sure I would have ever spent the time(money) to learn how to use it. But for the lack of a couple very simple things, like functional text tools, I’ve really come to enjoy fusion.
For a couple billable hours a year, I can have a subscription. Not much to fret about there. But, for me, in my early stages of usage, I am not particularly invested. Before I pull the trigger on a subscription, I am surely going to shop. Probably sign up for a student seat with Solidworks. The cost is no comparison. But neither are particularly expensive relative to most hobbies, and to me, the software and knowledge gained is more valuable than any hard upgrade I could do to a Shapeoko.
On another note, if you are buying, don’t pay for the upgrade until a few days before the deadline. Why pay early and lose the extra time on the tail end.
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Have read this and several other threads about the changes to Fusion 360, concerns about availability of functions in the future, and other CAD/CAM software options out there and they’re relative functionality… I have just now realized the solution that will make everyone happy.
The next version of Carbide Create just has to replicate all the functions of Fusion 360.
Problem solved! Let me know when it’s ready, guys. Going to go have lunch.
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We’ll knock that out over the weekend.
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The only reason I invested the time to learn Fusion 360 is because, at that point in time, Carbide Create was in beta.
Now, CC Pro is looking pretty good. I’ll spend the next few months learning CC Pro while continuing to rely on F360 for everyday work.
Never expected the “free” to last too long.
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I’d be happy to pay $300/year for Fusion360, I’m concerned that the price will likely end up in the $1000/year range. I judge this on the features Fusion has relative to similar options. It does seem like a lot for a hobby, but I figure it might push me to sell enough projects to cover the cost.
I use Solidworks for design too, which I prefer to use for designing, but having CAM and CAD so seamless in Fusion360 is pretty hard to beat, plus the HSM based CAM is easy and powerful.
Vectric Vcarve and Carbide Create Pro are great for more artistic type jobs and signmaking, but at this point in time they can’t fill the same role as a parametric modeller like Fusion or Solidworks. (CC Pro and F360 make a great combo)
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Found an article on their revenue from last quarter:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/autodesk-inc-announces-fiscal-2021-200100271.html
it will be interesting to see next quarter’s, as well as a report of the number of users after this change settles down.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Autodesk Fusion 360 changing hobbyist licensing — what other tools should be considered?
Can anyone clarify what the “10 active file limit” means? My typical design involves a rectangle with a couple bosses and holes, nothing complex. Does the file limit mean that I can only retain 10 files in the cloud storage Projects tab and anything else will need to be archived?
FWIW, & I’m probably using the wrong terms from ignorance, but I rarely assemble multiple “files” or individual saved designs into a larger design. Not totally sure how the limits would affect my use. Most of my use right now is related to the Shaper Origin so CAM is not even an issue. I could default back to Sketchup, but I’ve been trying to pivot to F360 as a learning experience to be able to leverage CAM for future uses.
On the big picture, my dos centavos is that while I love having free access to the software I don’t see a business case justification for AutoDesk beyond the expectation that free users would grow into paying customers. I suspect that policing the free users became more costly/impractical than expected which prompted backtracking on the long-term commitment, true hobby users would stick with it and anyone who was gaming the system would be incentivized to pay up. “Free” was always a marketing strategy to get users familiar with the product and ultimately convert them to subscribers.
Like many here, I’m disinclined to adding another $XX in monthly subscription to my discretionary costs, I’d be more likely to pay $100-ish for an annual hobby license and not have to see the billing on every monthly statement.
RMW
Apparently it is 10 files which you can actively edit/modify.
It’s my understanding that f you’re using assemblies you can reference archived parts/files on a read-only basis. The parts would need to be unarchived before editing.
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That is my understanding as well after their latest update on the blog post. Basically an assembly can reference archived documents.
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Yeahhh the freemium bait & switch. Thought that might happen. For 30 years Autodesk had given Adobe a run for their money in the most predatory business practices, & right when Apple was getting a lot of criticism for locking people into their “ecosystem”, all the big software houses jumped on the bandwagon. Dassault threw a free 2d alternative out there to Autocad, and Autodesk threw a free 3d modeler out there to get a generation of students creating their work in it instead of Solidworks. Adesk tried a decade earlier to take Solidworks’ market share with Inventor but were too late to the party & Inventor was still priced to the moon like it was 1988. So now, after all those multitudes have their design libraries in fusion that they’ll effectively have to abandon or pay protection money, Adesk starts pulling the rug out. What was the first batch of functionality they took back out, simulation? Now it’s multipart assy’s, and Rapid moves? In 6 months, I expect adaptive tool paths will be on the chopping block.
My planned transition to a legit Fusion user is now one less thing I’ll have to spend any time on. Instead I suppose I’ll stick to using the standalone installs of the very nice professional-level Inventor Studio Pro w/ HSM software that the engineering/programming students of the world keep sharing on to Capt Jack Sparrows Bay. …which is the software Autodesk could have just sold everyone in the first place, sold 10x as much of it by pricing it in the modern market of today instead of the 1980s, and poured that revenue into developing, providing them and us with a lot more value for the $. Instead we got the worst of both worlds, as usual from them, bc they always have to go one greedy business decision too far.
There is room for an open-source Inventor-like solid modeler. Make it run on ARM processors, toss it on tablets, crowdsource the support, & take over the entire world.
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I invested some time deciding on which 3D CAD system to go with last year. I initially settled on Fusion360 but shortly after I was able to be somewhat productive on it, the last change in terms happened. I got spooked and turned all my energy toward FreeCAD. It is still maturing but now I’m able to work around the bugs and limitations. There is active development in their ToolPath workbench and I have been happy with it so far.
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To my knowledge, it has not been clarified if removal of “simulation” refers to only their full simulation mode (a top-level menu like “design” or “manufacturing”, e.g. thermal/physical simulation) or also to the “toolpath simulation” function of the manufacturing mode.
Honestly, I’ve identified so many errors during toolpath simulation (both mine and bugs with F360 itself) that I would consider its loss a deal-killer … or one that forces me to pay for the product or switch to a competitor (and finally decide to start selling some of the stuff I make on my machine).
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The consensus seems to be that it’s FEA and similar sorts of simulation — if it is toolpath simulation there are many 3rd party options.
In their FAQ they specifically clarify that toolpath simulation is still included:
- Toolpath simulation in the Manufacture workspace is not going anywhere and will still be available.
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