proposal for CAM Studio in free version of Onshape

fst

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.

fst

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.