Best Of

First, you guys have built a truly amazing product! The parametric CAD features are amazing, the extensibility hooks mean it keeps getting even better, the integrated version control was an unexpected and welcome bonus, the cloud storage and user interface are great, and the design sharing features are awesome. The ability to instantiate an instance of someone else's part customized with parameters and then modify it for your own designs is IMHO something that's not yet fully appreciated. I use the versioned configurations to publish customisation links for my models like https://www.printables.com/model/649052-sys-peglock-parametric-usb-charging-tool-holder. This could easily become the github of CAD. There are some minor nit-picks I could make; the filleting and chamfering can be a bit fragile around tricky corners, some kind of branch and merge feature in the version control would be nice, and you could lean more into the community sharing with user profiles, design review discussions, stats on design references/downloads/copies etc. But they are all minor quibbles and things are getting better all the time.

And I really don't mind your pricing model. The free plan is the reason I'm using it and I actually like the constraint that designs must be public, since it agrees with my GPL biases. The business plan prices seem perfectly reasonable for businesses, and if I had one that needed CAD I'd be happily paying for it. 

However, I have one big Fear, and it's big enough that every time I start a new design I re-consider switching to something else.

I'm terrified that at any moment OnShape will suddenly be unusable for me, and all my designs will be lost, and all my effort into making them will be wasted. This absolutely is the reason I have not invested any time in learning and contributing Feature Script. "Unusable for me" could mean priced beyond my means as a hobbyist, priced beyond the other hobbyists I want to share my designs with, "merged into our product line" by a new owner who wants to kill it in favour of their other products, have the free tier crippled into uselessness to force people onto too-high priced tiers, left to decay into a poorly supported mess by bean-counters maximising profits, or just go bust and shut down. I've been lucky so far and glad I chose OnShape over Fusion360. I'm not the only person scared by this; see https://youtu.be/J--QVhGheP4?si=6_ndnBNw7pb22P39&t=534 where OnShape's biggest caveat is that "they could change it at any time".

When I design something, I want to come back to it in 5 years, 10 years, or even longer and have it still be there, ready for me to make a v2.6 or re-use it for something else. Heck, I want my kids to be able to re-use it. As an Open Source developer there is code on GitHub I wrote more than 25 years ago that is still maintained and fairly widely used. Note that I don't have the same fear with GitHub as I do with OnShape, because GitHub is based on Open Source tools for distributed repo's, so I do have my own copies of everything and all the tools to use them. If GitHub blew up tomorrow, my projects would be fine, and I've migrated software projects off dead/dying platforms before (remember SourceForge?). But if that happened with OnShape, I don't really have any escape options, and that scares me enough to consider not even bothering with it.

By far, the worst thing about this is I pretty much know already that it's (almost) inevitable that OnShape will become unusable for me at some point. No matter how much you guys cry "we would never do that" and even genuinely mean it, eventually the financial incentives will win out and the profit reaping and cost cutting will begin. After working 17 years at Google, which started out as the most genuinely moral and altruistic company I'd ever seen, I've seen it happen before from the inside.

The problem is your business model is pretty much a definitive example of the enshitification model (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification). Right now you are in the "offer useful products and services at a loss, as a way to gain new users" phase, which is why you have the free tier with barely any limitations. However, once you guys achieve peak market penetration and have locked your users in, the enshitification will begin, and no matter how hard individuals at OnShape try to resist, financial forces will slowly win; users will be forced to pay more, costs will be cut, and the product will start to degrade. The first thing to go will be the free tier, because there is zero financial reason to keep doing it once you've got all the users you are going to get. It will probably not be killed instantly, which might scare users off, instead it will be killed incrementally by moving features to the paid-tiers only, and/or changing "free" to "cheap, but slowly getting more expensive".

So what can be done? Corey Doctorow suggests two things; respect of the end-to-end principle, and the right of exit. Unfortunately I cannot see any incentives for a company to do this; it might help ease people like me's fears to encourage joining and retention, but in the end we are not the customers who can be forced to pay much, and the "right of exit" (and to a lesser extent "end-to-end", when you figure out how monetise design sharing) undermines the whole "milk them when they are trapped" plan. So this could only be done by legislation, which I can't see happening.

So what can actually be done? The only thing I can think of is to try and change the business plan so that there are financial incentives in place to try and stop this happening.

I might not be able to justify paying for a business plan, but I am willing to pay what may be a surprising amount to help ensure OnShape stays useful for me and people like me. I would happily pay OnShape money for nothing more than what I'm already getting on the free plan, just to try and make sure it's still going to be there for me in the future. I'm sure there are many others like me. So what if in addition to the free and business plans you added a "patron" option, where people can make (regular?) donations of whatever they feel like to ensure OnShape stays useful for them? There doesn't need to be any differentiation in features/functionality/support between the free and patron users. You could maybe lean in on the social/sharing features you have and encourage people to make a donation to OnShape if they use and like a public design.

My hope is that if patron donations become a significant enough source of revenue, there will be financial incentives to grow and satisfy those users, which means continuing to provide a good free service. And maybe OnShape can still be around hosting my designs for my grand-kids to marvel at :-)