The perils of SaaS strike again. It used to be that you bought a license, and then the software was yours to use eternally thereafter with zero external dependencies.
When will the users learn that SaaS means the software can change at any time out of your control, up to and including not functioning at all, and you will not be able to do anything about it?
Or will their minds continue to be "clouded" by the corporate propaganda?
I think the question of why people will willingly "build on a shaky foundation" is appropriate, especially given the type of software this is.
This is a fairly core feature they're removing from a product they already sold.
I also liked that they don't make any attempt at claiming this is for any reason other than more money. No "oh our new models are too powerful to run locally" or "oh for security reasons" or whatever. Which would be pretty transparent bullshit but I think a lot of companies would try anyways. This literally admits that the cloud functionality is identical, just paid per use.
Imo if you bought the product in this state, fine, but if you bought it before they probably ought to have to grandfather you in forever.
And is now token-based. According to this[0], tokens are $3 a pop. A "basic study" simulation costs 3 tokens ($9) and an "advanced study" simulation costs 6 tokens ($18). Imagine how quickly you could rack up charges as you iterate on a design.
Mind you, a token is $3/piece. You can only buy them in packs of 500 and higher, and they expire in a year’s time. Something that I’ve noticed is that you used to be able to buy 100 tokens, but they removed that option some time ago, too.
I just sent in a request for a refund of the balance on my one-year subscription that I just purchased a month ago. Unfortunately it is over the 30-days in their purchase refund policy by just one day. Hopefully they honor it, and then I am purchasing Rhino, and I will use my free FEA options (Calculix, openFoam, Lisa 8.0 (I bought this for less than $100USD. Demo is free for 1000 nodes perpetually), and believe it or not, Mathematica has some cool ways of FEM/FEA techniques. This is such a creepy way of making money by pissing your customer off. I am getting sick of Autodesk. I once sold Autodesk products (Inventor, Mechanical) in the NYC Tri-state area for six months. My only real true sales job. I was told I was too technical, and to upsell the client!
EDIT: I know nTopology is expensive, but has anyone tried it or have experience with it? I am willing to spend money on products that are truly productive and innovative.
I really do hope this finally pushes the open source community to create a viable and enjoyable to use 3D CAD modelling software. I work with code a lot but I was never really able to get into OpenSCAD, and FreeCAD crashes too often for my liking in addition to having a (in my opinion) unintuitive UI/workflow. I've moved on to Solidworks (student edition as I am a student) for now but am still keeping an eye out for alternatives.
It's astounding how much disrespect people will tolerate from proprietary software. If someone tried to disable my bike to force me to use their overpriced charter service, I'd call the police... we've somehow convinced ourselves this behavior is fine if it involves a computer. It is good to avoid doing business with people who act in this way. You deserve better.
I fell for Fusion 360's siren call years ago... by the time I realized their intentions, I'd made many, many designs in it. Fortunately, I came to my senses and abandoned the account, instead donating the price of 360's license to FreeCAD instead. CAD is a foundational technology. We can't leave it in the hands of some greedy VPs. If you must do business with a vendor of proprietary software, at least choose a company who will see your investment as a mutually beneficial partnership. Autodesk really seems to view your investment as a convenient leverage point to screw you when you're good and vulnerable.
As someone who is mostly familiar with autodesk's M&E division which is responsible for 3ds Max and Maya, it is comforting to see that the other parts of autodesk also hate their customers.
This is with one month of notice?
I don't use AutoCAD, so I'm a nobody here, but these sound like pretty important and often-used features to cut (er, transfer to pay-per-use) without _any justification_ whatsoever.
Seems like a great move to finally strangle that golden goose that's been kicking around all these years.
As someone who uses and relies on Fusion for work, it's frustrating how customer hostile Autodesk is. And this is on top of their subscription price increase they announced in March.
A part of me wants to reimplement the tool holders for ToolWall[1] in OpenSCAD[2] and be done with it with Autodesk forever.
[1] - https://toolwallhq.com
[2] - https://openscad.org
Their cloud is extremely slow, even saving a simple object as STL to print is slow.
If you save it via the export as workaround it takes milliseconds to save.
If you save it via the default menu you are in for a 2 minute wait where their cloud is doing something and then it generates the same file.
Absurd.
As a hobbyist who used Fusion 360 for various woodworking design and CNC tasks, this doesn’t really impact me, however, it basically pushes me a lot closer to investing in other tools.
Basically, pulling features without much communication or forewarning is just not OK.
Part of me wonders about the feasibility of an open source business based around paid support and training of a complex professional tool. I know of cases this works for tools aimed at software engineers, but I’d be curious if that was really attempted with CAD
How user-hostile. With all this cloud nonsense the need for effort and funding in open-source CAD is greater than ever.
Several years ago I advocated transitioning our academic robotics research lab to using Fusion 360 as our default for design. I regret that choice more and more with every decision like this. We are rarely affected by these changes on our academic license, but I hate to see students invest in a tool that may suddenly become unreasonable to continue using later.
About a year ago we finally banned Autodesk from our department because of policies like this and the looming cloud lock. We had a good hard look at what we actually needed, and decided to pay significantly more for the whole SOLIDWORKS Shebang, as it integrates well with CST Studio. When it came to EAGLE, we decided on KiCad as it has well developed and currently fits our needs without quite needing Altium.
They... uh... know that Autodesk is used in a lot of airgapped SCIFs, right? This was always our problem with moving flight simulators to pure SAAS: if the Air Force couldn't use it we couldn't afford to make it.
This could make Autodesk a no-go for companies that make designs for defense or critical infrastructure, where sharing the design with Autodesk (or any other entity) is not an option.
Companies that are not based in the US in particular will probably start looking at Solidworks, if they have not done so already.
I swear, the companies in 3d software tooling adjacent industries must almost _want_ Blender to eat their lunch.
If affected companies banded together to pay in even 10% of what they currently pay Autodesk towards working with the blender foundation, we'd see it all in FOSS within 2 years.
Coordination problems are hard though. Only time will tell how hard people will actually push back.
you can explore the cloud solve options, which utilize the same solvers as the local solvers had previously.
They're not even pretending it's some kind of fancy big-computer advantage.
I'll just leave this here.
Whelp, there goes any interest I had in paying for Fusion360.
edit: In the interest of not just whining, does anyone know a competent hobbyist-grade fea/cfd solution? Doesn't have to be free[0], but I'm not going to pay for a license to pay for compute.
[0] I've tried open foam once or twice, but couldn't get a decent workflow put together (model > mesh > sim > results).
I'm late to this thread but wanted to ask in case anyone sees this and has a specific recommendation:
Is there a good free/cheap alternative to F360 for me?
I use Fusion 360 to model simple things for 3d printing. I've gotten used to it and think it's great when things work, but have been weary of their cloud and buggy "free personal use" licensing stuff since the start.
I'll check out some of the other programs mentioned in this thread -- SolveSpace, FreeCAD etc. -- but from a first glance it seems they will all take ages to get used to.
Maybe I should try become a Blender god even though IIRC that isn't really set up to do parametric modelling (I have a passing interest in game design etc. so the skill could be useful)?
FreeCAD has local simulation. Don't like the UI? Pitch in or fund the team.
Is there anyone interested in working on an open source alternative to Fusion 360, Solidworks, etc.? A Blender for CAD/CAM?
There’s a real need for this.
Hi there, Autodesk engineer here. I haven't been here too long, but it's decisions like these which make me ashamed to be associated with this company. I work on a different product, but it feels incredibly odd sometimes to see these kinds of articles, because the engineers I work with are really focused on the end user experience, at least on my team. That being said, I've seen a lot of issues here.
First off, our sales force is ridiculously massive. We have 8,000 full time sales people (although they get a fancy title like, solutions expert). In comparison, the number of engineers and UX folks who work on Revit is under 200. We're completely sales-first.
Second off, the amount of mid-level managers who have no other dependents besides a manager is astounding. My boss's boss has no other dependents than my boss, and it's the same thing with my boss's boss's boss. Have absolutely no clue what value they add to the org. There's so much political infighting that makes it incredibly hard to get anything accomplished, we have certain teams that refuse to communicate with another team and they literally just go two separate paths instead of following a unified vision.
Third, our top level VP's / executive suite have never used Autodesk products before. I'm not kidding about this. I'm 100% that our new CTO, Raji Arasu, has never used any Autodesk product before, based on meetings we've had. Given her background from Intuit, this isn't a huge surprise, but could you imagine if the CTO at Tesla had never driven a Tesla before?
I'm not sure how we've gotten to this point. The CEO is literally a rocket scientist from JPL, I can't figure out why he's running the company into this direction of extreme greed. Autodesk is a complete monopoly, and many of the people inside this org are extremely comfortable with the moat that Autodesk has built. I'm not.
I cannot overstate how good for humanity it would be to have good open source 3D CAD. I kind of think/hope that eventually we will move to all open source software, but it may be a very long time. I can’t imagine how many engineering projects around the globe will suffer because of this one decision. This decision is a net negative for humanity.
I see an opportunity and truly hope for an open source CAD/CAM project with similar success to what Blender has achieved on the modeling/animation/rendering side. There are a few CAD /CAM free software efforts but nothing comes close yet that I've seen, which keeps me paying the Autodesk subscription / tax.
This is ridiculous. I've done some FEA analysis models in Fusion 360 and simple models are way quicker when ran locally. Like 5 seconds vs 30 seconds.
Most galling was that they glued Eagle into fusion and killed off Eagle, the largest EDA tool.
I like their [0] anti piracy page. So disconnect from reality with their pricing.
To think I used to tell a story about how in college I went to there were 2 primary cad packages being used, One was I think CadKey? The other was Autocad (10ish through 12ish for dos). Cadkey required a hardware dongle to run, autocad required a serial number and the floppies were normal and copied fine.
"Why don't they copy protect that? what are they stupid?"
Everyone in the world (seemingly) had a pirate copy of acad at home for free, and got real good at it, and every small shop that does any sort of drawing even art stuff like sign makers let alone landscapers, architects, urban planers, etc, alllll ended up buying tons of legit licenses because everyone they wanted to hire plus their own selves, all know acad, and no one's even heard of cadkey or whatever that other one was.
I used to tell that story as an example of enlightened self interest, deliberately enabling piracy being not only nicer but also making you far richer than fanatically trying to detect and prosecute every tiny instance of "zomg theft!".
Either Autodesk was never actually that intentionally nice company I thought they were, or it changed.
I have read a few articles from early employees and I think what it really was originally was schizophrenic. It had people with different attitudes at the same time so the company did both good and bad things at the same time, until the douchebags won as they always do and drove the nice guys out.
Sometimes I feel bad about being so behind the curve on hosting and data storage and running the little python notebook that could on my personal machine, but then I see stuff like this.
I took some evenings to investigate the state of entry-level CAD software for some 3D designs I need to do, and this is timely—-I have no interest in subscription offerings and find cloud-centric solutions to be too risky in general terms (especially lock in), but Fusion 360 has such a huge user base that I could not ignore it.
I will go on investigating FreeCAD, Solverspace and CAD Sketcher for Blender…
Autodesk are just the worst offenders. I hope Blender will thrive (even more) and CAD software will follow the lead.
Oof, that doesn't sound like a popular move! Speaking of simulations though, there is SideFX Houdini? (can probably handle CAD-type stuff a bit nowadays? and certainly lots of types of simulations!)
I do hope that SideFX (Houdini) stays independent. Things I've heard suggest that they intend to, and I also hope that they continue on their current trajectory - I think the general direction is very positive! Not perfect of course (and not opensource of course, but very open in practice) A lot of very solid dev seems to happen at SideFX, and a lot is communicated about what's happening, and their support (email contact for when things go wrong) is absolutely STELLAR too!
Crack that shit, fuck them
Man, Autodesk has been making all the wrong moves recently. What is going on over there?
Just use Solidworks. They have the largest market share by far, you can find and hire people that have used it to design and ship actual products with it, it has a special startup pricing deal for startups that have raised less then a million, student licenses, and if you need to buy a seat outright they start at 4k, with 1.5k maintenance per year. That's for unlimited use, it's your software. 1.5k for each batch of cloud computers tokens, that's gonna add up fast...
There's a lot of grumbling in here from people that I have to assume don't understand what Fusion 360 is. This was always an uncomfortably cloud-based product. You cannot save files locally with this package. This decision isn't (or at least shouldn't be) blindsiding anybody. There are countless packages from Dassault, Autodesk, PTC, Siemens, Ansys, OpenFOAM, etc. that you can buy perpetual licenses for.
I figured this would happen sooner or later. As someone who runs mechanical FEA when necessary, I know why some companies are reluctant to use this particular CAD/simulation package.
A lot of industries have export restrictions, and non-local storage or use of export restricted hardware designs is a significant federal penalty.
Ansys and abaqus, older competitors than fusion simulation, will have local solves for this reason.
I was thinking to test Fusion360 personal/home edition. But I have read something that all you do is saved in the cloud. Is this correct or can your things be save privately and locally only?
I also think that I have read something that anything you do with the free version is public available but that have to be wrong or I have mixed this up with some other software, or?
It’s funny, I commented on the update release blog where they announced this, and the comment has been “awaiting moderation” ever since.
I pay for fusion, and this really sucks. I’m happy to pay for a product I use, but I am not game to get nickel and dimed for features that used to be built in.
The software is great, but Autodesk clearly needs some new PMs.
Is this a feature we could add to openscad? Seems like a lot of people would be willing to pay someone to add it.
The cloud is DRM.
So Autodesk fusion 360 is opting out of government and defence contracts?
I presume there's rules somewhere where parts for the F-22, or HIMARS can't be hosted on some random companies cloud.
What domains do I need to out in my hosts file to block their updater?
Autodesk, already renowned as one of the worst IT companies under the sun finds new and innovative ways to fuck their customers sideways, news at 10.
Wonder how many companies will be forced to drop the app because they don’t allow their designs to be uploaded to the cloud.
Man, I can’t understand what they’re thinking over at Autodesk. Right now I have the student license for Fusion 360- I was (still am to be frank) thinking about becoming a paying customer at some point- occasionally they do a $100 a year sale, which is a far more reasonable price than it is normally. But when they keep pulling crap like this, it makes it real hard to commit to, especially with Onshape existing and SOLIDWORKS having not-terrible personal offerings now.
If I were pulling the strings, I’d go all in on trying to convert hobbyists and students- pricing at $100/$150 a year all year round and add a monthly tier for $15/$20. I don’t even mind locking features like simulation behind a paywall- 99% of users designing for 3D printing, 2D manufacturing like laser cutting, and basic CNC machined parts don’t need them (though I’d throw in a few free cloud credits for the value-add, and make them a bit less of a rip-off). What do I know though.
One thing I suspect- there are a lot of people using the free license to make money (which is not allowed), so I guess they’re turning the screws on.. their paying customers? Much easier to just make the software good value IMO.
Actcad is pretty good and very reasonbly priced, and uses all the same commands as autocad
I just wish there was anything remotely close to as ergonomic as Fusion 360.
They call it Fusion 360 because you turn 360 degrees and walk away
Why couldn't Musk have bought Autodesk instead of Twitter, it's about the same price
Sinking ship!
So…solidworks?
This is a new low, truly more dystopian than I imagined software could ever get.
Imagine this becoming a pattern. You have software you need for work, and the company behind it wants more money — so they pick the most popular feature and make it pay-per-use. It’s horrifying.
I hope this fails fast and hard, as a lesson to other companies. I doubt it, though. I ran IT at a big architecture firm 25 years ago, and everyone hated Autodesk then. That hasn’t changed — most architects still hate Autodesk, even if they have to or choose to get value from Autodesk products.
At that point AutoCAD still used dongles for licensing. If you upgraded a license you had to have both dongles plugged in. Some computers with multiple upgrades had multiple dongles hanging off the back, and I had to build custom dongle supports so they wouldn’t fall out and deauth a machine in the middle of someone’s work.
So yeah, even with that history, this surprises and horrifies me.
1. Fusion 360 appears to be pivoting towards CAM instead of CAD. Their CAM is getting better all the time. 2. Cloud sharing features in Fusion360 are unparalleled for cooperation between companies, SolidWorks doesn't come anywhere close. 3. Who needs FEA and isn't willing to pay a nominal fee? Anyone using an analysis feature is getting a lot more than what should come with a basic modeling and drawing package. 4. Simulation is definitely not a core feature for designers. It's an edge case, rarely used and is getting pulled further out from core functionality into cost+ territory. 5. With the pathetic Fusion 360 Manage this product seems directionless to me, but that's a separate topic. I see this change as moving even further away from engineers. Autodesk, if you're listening, we (designers and engineers) drive the bus at the end of the day. If you make your product suck for engineers (it does), we can and will move. 6. Refactoring CAD/CAM libraries is hard and involves a lot of technical, monotonous work. That's the "moat", but give me a good direction to move in and I and other designers and engineers will push hard to drop Fusion 360 like a hot potato if things don't turn around.
For consumers in some jurisdictions they may be able to get refunds on the product if it can be argued that this feature was a core reason the application was purchased.
However once you are a business many of those protections aren’t present. There is an assumption that businesses should be able to sort things out amongst themselves and the court system. However an SME barely has any more power then a consumer going against a giant like Autodesk.
I wonder if the solution wouldn’t be to extend those protections to smaller businesses, and additionally allow reclaiming the cost of any investments in the platform (Training, etc) and other expenses. Your not telling autodesk what they can do with their product, but if they are selling it based on features they are removing, they will be liable to make right anyone who purchased on that basis.