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Anyone using Onshape for real yet?
traveler_hauptman
Member, OS Professional, Mentor, Developers Posts: 419 PRO
in General
Has anyone committed a commercial project of any significance to Onshape yet?
If so, put a dollar amount to your reply. If Onshape went dark tomorrow, how much money would you have to spend for employee time to rebuild your project in your 'normal' CAD to keep your customer?
(ie open source, hobby, and internal projects don't count)
If so, put a dollar amount to your reply. If Onshape went dark tomorrow, how much money would you have to spend for employee time to rebuild your project in your 'normal' CAD to keep your customer?
(ie open source, hobby, and internal projects don't count)
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Main reason for putting model in OS is future ease of collaboration with suppliers and version control with suppliers, so I am easing them in gently. Most are not tech people and having a simple browser based CAD markup is within their scope.
The new comment improvements have come just in time.
Jon
I have a customer that's thinking of buying 3 seats of SW. I'm trying to push them towards OS.
They do medium sized assemblies of prismatic parts. OS is really close to handling these types of projects.
I have less than $10,000 worth of a billable hours on customer projects using OS.
@traveler_hauptman I've invested ~100 hours moving from a 2011 SolidWorks design to pure Onshape for www.dropletlife.com. My labor is free, as co-founder. At this point, we're all in with Onshape.
If Onshape folded or more likely got bought by a rich competitor anxious to shut it down, I wouldn't be that upset about the sunk cost. What would be painful is going back to a prohibitively expensive subscription model that doesn't make sense at all for my scale of business. It's giving up all the advantages of Onshape (first class collaboration, first class versioning, first class multi-part development) for a good modeler that has a barely adequate constellation of expensive add-on tools.
For what it's worth, I'm not using Onshape for fun. I'm using it because (for my needs) it is already the better tool. My personal calculus was: What's the cost of NOT moving to Onshape? That price has been too high for 10 years now.
I'm the lead engineer at Inboard (www.inboardskate.com) and we're slowing moving from SW to Onshape. We have thousand of hours of development hours on Onshape and that represents a LOT of money. We are not worried about it though, we believe their futuristic vision of CAD will take over other existing softwares. If you are worried about losing your files you can always back up everything as Step or Iges files on an hard drive!
Cheers!
But to answer your question more directly, yes we HAVE committed our commercial products to Onshape. Here are my thoughts on cost analysis of Onshape vs. prior CAD systems:
- Assuming that our files actually went "poof" and we had to re-design everything by memory, I expect it would take $1000-$3000 to catch back up.
- In a more realistic (but still highly unlikely) scenario where Onshape let us download our files from the servers before shutting down, I expect the cost would be <$500.
- But be sure to think about the efficiency gain of collaboration. Prior to Onshape, my consultant and I used different CAD programs to do our work. Sharing files was a pain to the point where it was easiest for one person to completely own a project. Then we would end up in a scenario where my consultant (high hourly rate) gets stuck doing a lot of design work that would have been better suited for another (lower cost) employee. It'd be hard to quantify that, but I promise you in the past couple months of development, this phenomenon could easily cost us >$1000!
- Don't forget the lost hours caused by traditional CAD on an average workstation. Prior to Onshape we purchased a $3000 workstation to run traditional CAD, and our models can get complex enough that a single modification was literally taking 2 minutes or more to process. That time adds up fast, and again I would argue that the losses from this issue would account for a good chunk of change.
In summary, I think any costs due to the unlikely scenario of Onshape "going dark" are quite easily offset by the efficiency gains of collaboration and superior computing power. In my opinion (and apparently that of my employees), Onshape is a superior tool that will end up saving us money and improving our design process. The missing features are a transient issue at best. Don't forget that Onshape has the best talent in the industry and its only a matter of time before everything you want is available (and probably designed better) too!I'm confident that Onshape will be our main tool and will probably increase our use of cad data since it's available in every device connected to internet..
This ease of use is really important for me because I switch hats constantly and have to stay proficient with every single aspect of my business, from conceptual idea to engineering to procurement to manufacturing to packaging to marketing to sales to delivery to support. Onshape fits well for me, being extremely productive while actually being fun to use which is not something I think I've ever said about SolidWorks. I have a moderate list of desired features for Onshape, but the fact that they're so responsive to feedback and that they seem to think things through before implementing features, I'm happy to now be relying on it for my business.
If Onshape went dark, I'd likely go back to SolidWorks but I'd be pretty depressed about it. The cost difference isn't really significant - I'd just trade the monthly Onshape subscription for a re-enrolled and renewed yearly SW maintenance contract since I already have a seat for the standard version. I assume we'd have some warning, so I could just export my geometry as Step and re-build required sketches as needed for any revisions. I'd probably give Fusion360 a try, though, because it appears to have evolved quite a bit on the Mac since they introduced it a few years back, but I'd be hesitant because my experience with Mac versions of Autodesk products is that I couldn't always rely on them to function reliably or smoothly, something Onshape has somehow managed to do inside just a browser window.
With that being said, we will absolutely be moving fully to Onshape! (from SolidWorks). Being able to design from an iPad as well as not ever having to purchase a node-locked "seat" of CAD again is huge for us. All of our designers are mobile, so this fits our business model perfectly.
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
Indaer -- Aircraft Lifecycle Solutions
It's been great to be able to work from anywhere using any computer. Some of my employees are remote so the cloud aspect of Onshape is very beneficial with increased access, sharing and version control.
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Multiple generations of prototype components were developed with Onshape.
I had fully committed to using Onshape even though there were gaps in the functionality compared to other commercial software. I wrote many enhancement requests through out the project and many have been addressed.
Ultimately, this was a multi-million dollar effort for my client.
I am looking at additional projects now where I feel Onshape will be ideal.
Tera Development Solutions
So for now, for me, it's just niche projects and lots of "rats and mice" models. Essentially my focus is on spare-time testing the functionality, partly to have a headstart if and when Onshape makes the grade, and partly to help my other aim, which is to become a useful member of the troubleshooting and enhancement-suggesting community.
My primary motivation for the latter (whose opportunity cost I do not, and do not want to, count) is because it's in my long-term interests for the product to take off and really fly, thereby turning 3D CAD into a commodity and a universal language.
On the topic of using OnShape "for real", my work will probably never switch because it took until I started three years ago to stop using AutoCAD and completely transition to Solidworks. Even at that, up until about six months ago, we were still saving out our Solidworks drawings to AutoCAD, which purchasing would then convert to PDF (crazy, right?). However, I have been putting money aside for a seat of Solidworks for myself, to try and go out on my own. Using OnShape for the past few days has made me really reconsider that, despite being a fairly big Solidworks fanboy. I can't wait to see the 2d drawing module. Once that is out, I'll be able to really make a decision about which software package is best for me. Keep up the great work, I hope OnShape is a boon to hobbyists and small one person shops that DS/Solidworks doesn't seem to have an interest in listening to the needs of.