proposal for CAM Studio in free version of Onshape

ferdinand_strixner

I read that CAM Studio is supposed to only be part of Onshape Professional and Enterprise (so the 2500€ variant and upwards)(?)
Imho a yearly 2500€ subscription CAM would be disproportional for a hobby or small business CNC that cost a few thousand dollars for the entire machine.
So my proposal would be to split this by postprocessor: Postprocessors for CNC machines up to 10000€ could be in the free version, 10k-100k CNCs in standard and 100k+ in professional+.
Then it would be more fitting and realistic - think the yearly subscription of a CAM system should not exceed 10% of the machine cost to be a viable option.

michael3424

I'm not sure that this is practical.  Who is going to obtain and maintain a list of verified machine prices?  Also, for many machines, options can double the price of the machine.

ferdinand_strixner

Assuming postprocessors are (mainly) made by the Onshape team, they have to invest some time into each (class) of machine anyways and maintain a collection of these postprocessors. Think it should be mostly obvious whether a machine is more for hobbyists ($$$$), small businesses ($$$$$) or enterprises($$$$$$+) - even with a factor of 2.

michael3424

@ferdinand_strixner - good luck on your quest, then. 

I've raised a similar request for a "hobby/entrepreneur" version of Onshape, priced at several hundred $/year but Onshape (or PTC) has not been interested.  That's their perogative, so I make the request once a year or so just in case things change.

wout_theelen541

I can definitely see the michael3424 said:

@ferdinand_strixner - good luck on your quest, then. 

I've raised a similar request for a "hobby/entrepreneur" version of Onshape, priced at several hundred $/year but Onshape (or PTC) has not been interested.  That's their perogative, so I make the request once a year or so just in case things change.

I could see a good business case for including at least some CAM functionality for standard and educational users. Differentiating between post processors would be really difficult but I could see a case of opening up 2.5 and 3 axis machines (with limited bed sizes) for standard users. I agree though it is very frustrating if you're a hobbyist using Fusion 360 when you know CAM studio is available.