Hopes & Fears for Onshape

Dave_Gaffney

Hopes:

Onshape will become the next Solidworks (Reach critical mass & become the industry standard for CAD)

Continue improving at an impressive pace

Fears:

Onshape will become the next Solidworks (Alienate its users with unreasonable T&C's, leaving them feeling trapped)

Pricing:

I understand that cash is king, particularly for a startup trying to prove a business model.

It would be nice to know that Onshape wouldn't jack up prices in the future, it would be even nicer if Onshape were to reward its early customers with locked-in discounted future pricing (with the ability to take breaks in subscription). This kind of incentive might help Onshape reach critical mass sooner and reward its early customers at a time when it can afford to.

philip_thomas

Dave - wow, some existentialism (and a bait to make forward looking statements)

We (our founders, employees and investors) are committed to building a professional grade 3D CAD solution for engineers and designers that leverages the benefits of the new platforms (cloud web and mobile) and works the way people work today (distributed and collaborative).

We did it before at SolidWorks (becoming the industry standard) and we are working towards that same goal here at Onshape.

While i can make no promises about future pricing, our strategy should be fairly transparent - we offer FREE for makers/hobbyists/amateurs (unlimited free public documents) and for the Professional user, we have established a price point that is lower than the annual maintenance cost of comparable installed software. Raising our price above that would be giving up the distinct advantage of being 'cheaper' (in terms of monthly cost - the Onshape total cost of ownership is considerably lower than our desktop competition).

The early adopters of Onshape were rewarded handsomely with significant lifetime discounts on their accounts. As the number of professional users increases we are always open to discussions about volume discounts and as always, you can turn a Professional account on and off as needed.

Yes, we want to deliver a game-changing solution AND be the good guys once again!

Thank you for your support of Onshape.

Mitch_Pricer

philip_thomas said:The early adopters of Onshape were rewarded handsomely with significant lifetime discounts on their accounts. As the number of professional users increases we are always open to discussions about volume discounts and as always, you can turn a Professional account on and off as needed.

Where are these handsomely significant discounts you speak of? 

kevin_quigley

Lifetime discounts if you signed up before it went into full scale beta. Personally I didn't take up the offer. 

philip_thomas

Kevin - no idea why some one voted that down - it was simply a factual statement that you made (i gave you an up vote )

3dcad

I consider myself as an early adopter (found Onshape roughly a year ago) but never heard of 'lifetime' discounts.
For me it would be enough to give lifetime guarantee that I can always use Onshape in it's full scale with $100 / month.
And possibility to add users to same company license on same price as needed.

@philip_thomas As you know I have been quite active follower on forums since I found it. I don't like anonymous vote downs - it might even cut some good discussion since no-one want's to take blame on down voting. Like you wanted to assure it wasn't you. 
Earlier I had a fan who voted all my comments down (around 50 down votes in few weeks), moderators removed those but it showed how someone can ruin the good spirit of this excellent and helpful forum.  

If I wan't to give down votes, I have no problems tag my username on that vote.

+1 for tagging down votes with username, actually down votes should be called 'disagree' and up votes 'agree'.

philip_thomas

Rami - that's because you're a stand up guy!

kevin_quigley

In all honesty, I take no notice of forum voting up or down. I say what I say based on experience. People can take it or leave it, no odds to me.

3dcad

@kevin_quigley
Neither do I, but if you answer on 'how to' question and your answer is voted down - it gives expression that your answer is not good or doesn't work.
I'm sure there is a lot of people looking for answers who never write on forums..

DriesV

kevin_quigley said:

In all honesty, I take no notice of forum voting up or down. I say what I say based on experience. People can take it or leave it, no odds to me.

Amen, Kevin. 
I think the concept of downvotes is a bit silly. You don't even know why a comment is being downvoted. In general I think this forum is quite civilized; Youtube is a different beast. 

Dries

Dave_Gaffney

I haven't checked in on this thread in a while, I agree that Kevin's post was useful, I have given him an up vote too*. I think showing who votes up/down is a good idea, can't argue with transparency. I think there is a place for voting, forums can get very cluttered with people posting that they agree with somebody that posted a couple of pages back in a thread. But yes, maybe agree/disagree would be better than up/down.

On my first reading of Philip's post I thought it was possible to pause your Professional account, that would be a nice feature to have for the way I work. When I looked for the option I couldn't find it, but I did find that my subscription was set to autorenew, so, thanks, you saved me $100!

I think 3dcad's suggestion is a good compromise:

3dcad said:

For me it would be enough to give lifetime guarantee that I can always use Onshape in it's full scale with $100 / month.
And possibility to add users to same company license on same price as needed.

For me the incentive isn't there to continue with the pro subscription, I will happily go back to using the free plan for now & follow Onshape's development with interest.

* Before posting this I did have to click on the "Vote Down" button for Kevins' post to check if I didn't do a late night phone fumble, which for a second brought his down votes up to 3, but I quickly toggled it off to bring them back down to 2.

While we are being transparent: I did vote Philip's post down, nothing personal, I just didn't like his answer.

Fields

Personally I see the $100/month as a good deal someday, and possibly higher, but not today. Not as an individual and certainly not for a business. The cheapest option for solidworks is $4000 or three and a half years of onshape. Question is still what are you getting in those years?

Currently in onshape's favor you have portability and better collaboration and I'm a huge fan of the improved mate connectors
Solidworks favor: many more features, more feature control, more hotkeys/shortcuts, customization, production/analysis tools, sheet metal, weldments, import feature recognition (to some extent), larger community base, more plugins, cleaner work environment (I'm looking at you feature tree and 10+ tabs that people keep crying out on), animations and renderings, simulation, better security over file permissions, 20+ year history (bigger companies WANT stable support that they know won't go bankrupt and leave them in the dark)

Granted to get high end control of items like simulation is an extra cost, but you have access to the same services that you have to pay extra for in onshape.

Other selling points are pretty low at this point. ie: "more frequent updates than the competitor" is not a selling point it's a requirement to catch up. I'll be impressed if you're releasing new features as often in 5 years let alone 20. Unfortunately even the portability may go away soon as solidworks is starting to test browser support now.


Don't get me wrong here. Onshape has amazing potential to be a real powerhouse. I follow the updates/blogs/webinars/tutorials almost religiously and even plan on promoting it locally, but at this point I would max out at paying $20/month for the current feature-set, unlimited or tiered. 

I understand if this post gets deleted as it is very unflattering, but I do hope to gain some positive attention from the leads at onshape before that happens. A lot of people want to support onshape, but have already said the pricing seems unrealistic. Through the webinars it is repeated that this is a professional cad system which feels like an excuse not a justification for the current price.

philip_thomas

Fields - we have no problems with anyone's opinions and don't take down posts unless they contravene the terms of use

3dcad

Fields said:

Personally I see the $100/month as a good deal someday, and possibly higher, but not today. Not as an individual and certainly not for a business. - clip

How much have you used Onshape? Have you tried it for projects that current features can do without workarounds?

I did a lot of single feature testing with free plan and decided to risk and go pro to be able to make some real work. After 6 months and big bunch of improvement requests (some of them currently implemented) it begins to feel more home than our primary cad system.

When I need to access old models in file based cad, I'm always frustrated with something being renamed or moved using file explorer. Recently I needed to create quick model with traditional cad and I found myself thinking all the time: Do I really need to create own sketch and feature for every part and why there is gazillion buttons behind all kind of tabs and menus while I only need one toolbar.

Not to even mention the hassle with updating models back to server if modified on the go..

I'm not saying Onshape is anywhere near to say SolidWorks or even Geomagic (Alibre) in feature level but they have some fundamental things light years ahead that makes them so promising that I'm not even a bit interested if SW is having browser support add-on in next years upgrades or not.

Fields

3dcad - I have used Onshape a good deal, though focusing mostly on a few features at a time. I do agree that the methodology behind the program is astounding and some of the features are better. Being that it is a newer program also gives the benefit of a clean slate and plenty of examples from other systems on what works and what doesn't.

That said, it still seems hard to justify the price tag this early. The forum has a huge wish list. Some are unique situations like specific mate conditions, but there are also many items that should be standard (i.e. file sharing control to prevent misuse)

I started to write out a response to each of your points, but that easily could have gotten us off subject.
Right now, we have the protocols in place that prevents almost all of these issues, and I don't use toolbars. I wouldn't mind talking more about those through email.