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Comments
I find a very surprising move, and a step back in my opinion.
I found the free plan to be perfect for long term evaluation of the product. In the early days I was just throwing together random geometry to just try and learn how Onshape works, all of it of no public interest whatsoever. A couple of months ago I got to a point where I decided to build a proper existing design into Onshape from the ground up to see how it holds up in a practical application. Can it handle the complexity of the geometry, how long does it take to do parametric updates, how does assembly performance hold up, model load times and tab switching, graphics performance, drawing performance, how does the document size relate to an actual design, etc. I planned to do this over an extended period of time, an hour here and there, all the while keeping an eye on the continued improvements and additions to Onshape. I was going to leave making the drawings untill last, because that has quite some way to go and not worth the asking price. Within the 100mb limit I planned to build what an actual project would look like over time, and use it to demo to others eventually. I will probably continue and accelerate my efforts to get as much done before December, and leave it there in view-only mode.
Product evaluation is a slow burn process, and a 21 day Professional trial in my experience never works. In the early days of Fusion I enabled a 30 trial a couple of times. You enable it, try it, find that it crashes a lot, can’t handle complexity yet, works in a way that you don’t appreciate yet and takes time to get accustomed to (like mate connectors in Onshape for example), is immature in key areas, and regardless of all that your initial enthusiam to try something new and shiny fades the next day when you’re required to do some real work instead of play with new software. With Fusion, I let a couple of trial periods lapse because it wasn’t worth my while yet. Not long after there would an update with improved functionality, but I had already used my free trial a few months prior, so would not be able to evaluate again without paying for. I completely lost interest in Fusion as a result.
I’m sure there are people who were able to use the free plan with the 10 document / 100mb limit to do designs they made money with. But surely any individual or organisation making a half decent amount of money would quickly run into a situation where more than 10 documents or 100mb would be required, in which case the $125/month asking price would be an easy decision to make. If you work around the free plan limitations by exporting your final design through STEP/DWG, or copy designs to keep clearing your revision history and reduce the document size, you must really not be making that much money with it to not want to pay $125 a month.
Onshape must really be going after the bottom end of the market already if they want to flush out those people that made do with the free plan for paid projects, into the Professional plan. It’s actually a bit worrying, it must be crunch time for Onshape already and there is a need to accelerate their ROI.
The free plan used to make a lot of sense; get students, hobbyists, makers, small startups etc. onboard with Onshape, skilled with the platform, and when they start making some half decent money, they will upgrade to a paid plan, or influence the companies they end up working for to consider using Onshape as the 3D CAD tool of choice. A bottom up approach rather than a top down approach. Onshape had completely removed any barrier for point of entry into Onshape’s full functionality which was such a strong point, now it is a useless 21 days trial or a relatively big step up to $125/month.
I agree with others that making available a lower cost plan would have made sense, like $10/month for 10 documents/100mb for example, for those people who do not want their designs and efforts to be open source. That’s the same pricepoint it took for me to sign up to a monthly Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom plan, entirely for personal use.
In any case, I’ll continue to evaluate Onshape, but will just be putting together generic bits of geometry, as I won’t make anything containing IP available to the public.
I'd also like to have an answer to this question. I recently dropped maintenance on GeoMagic Design and could have happily put that $400/year or a bit more toward Onshape. No doubt F360 will also increase their pricing at some point and maybe they will be happy to take my money if that happens.
I sure hope that Onshape reconsiders.
For the US$125/month I'd be better off with Solid Edge Design & Draft. This is a product that has many years of refinement & full drafting tools.
I would be willing to pay a fee for some private documents (~20$/mth).
Now I will stop promoting Onshape. Hopefully the announced full-cloud CAD systems Xdesign (Dassault) or Leopard (Autodesk) or the existing Fusion 360 will be an alternative for me.
I was kidding...
projektowanieproduktow.wordpress.com
I am quite sure, they have been able to fix this piece of code in the meantime and it runs smoothly.
So could it not be used now to calculate my private storage and send me a monthly bill with 1$/100MB private space?
Benefits:
- code is there
- brings money
- everyone is free how much he would like to hold closed / willing to pay
- today's makers, tomorrow's startups are already all in
addition: to have a separation to the pro plan, limits like available private space would be necessary.
Very disappointed.
A very short sight.
Not impressed having been singing your praised
Good recommendations are hard won
Bad recommendations spread far far quicker.
I will not be going PRO whilst there is no adequete Sheet Metal or Fabrication environments that compare to Solidworks.
Solidworks offers me one month free trial and recently offering better deals with a full usable package.
I can no longer from Dec 15th use Onshape for any pre order investigation work (quoting) as I cannot have any private document on the free package and a customers part is normaly NDA.
Thankfully I only recommended Onshape a couple of times, so not too much collatoral damage to me personaly.
I now need to ask the question on future release dates as it is now highly pertinent.
WHEN WILL YOU HAVE A SHEET METAL ENVIRONMENT? @jon_hirschtick
Please do not ignore the question as you re now effectively requesting payment of $1200 a year for a product that is not yet full developed for commercial use. To pay Onshape $125 a month I need to be able to win and bill design work to a value of $1000 a month minimum. In my opinion this needs rethinking quickly.
First there was the unlimited private documents with ten active at the same time.
Then there was max ten private documents.
Now there is none and the pro plan has gone up 25%.
How will the rules change next time?
cheers Kusti
Is there a way to be more open about it ? It's actually the same answer for over a year now.
I think david has got a good point here. Your product (onshape) does evolve about every other month quite a bit. Therefore a 21 day trial isn't the best solution IMHO. Maybe you could allow 1 private document on the free plan ?
This comment is another big aspect! By changing the rules that often you are hurting the whole cloud apllication market IMHO.
Please start the conversation and reasons why you decided these changes are necessary. We know you don't have to explain yourself, but talking about it with the Onshape community would be a good step
All those makers and small startups heading off into the bush for the lack of a $10 a month mid plan.
Why not even possibly "look chaps (and chapesses), we can't carry on offering the free plan, but we can convert the same terms as the free plan into a $10 a month 'startup' plan, after your 21 day free trial....after which you can choose between the startup plan or the professional plan".
I would pay $10 a month to keep what is on the free plan. I can't pay $125 a month, and I don't want the one project I am working on to be public yet. I'll be exporting it as a solid and looking for another program.
You have really shot yourselves in the foot.
In any case, now that all of the free plan documents are going to be public, it might be a good idea to develop a method to separate work in progress documents from finished documents. I've always found that the public search results are filled with useless unfinished models. Perhaps you could include a search filter to only display documents with a first version.
1. "...this news may disappoint some users" - May disappoint? Cruelly worded, to my ear.
2. "the purpose of the free plan has always been focused on the needs of hobbyists, makers, and open source designers." - What aspiring hobbyists and makers need is to be able to protect their budding IP, something large organizations can afford. No hobbyists and makers I know have a legal department, so removing private documents is a particularly egregious decision.
3. May be my aging memory, but I don't recall the free plan being pitched much to open source designers. Perhaps it's mentioned now because the plan changes essentially make all users "open source designers"?
4. Personally, I don't need more storage space - but private documents are critical. I could live with fewer, but all hobbyists and makers need to protect their ideas - just in case one ends up being commercially viable.
5. So sad - all the wasted hours, the recommendations I made to others now make me look foolish and, as regards the Onshape mission - so much squandered good will.
Please reconsider.
- Al
Using nonsensical document names to try hiding your designs ("privacy by obscurity") isn't real privacy, and the moment Onshape decides that searching will also include user names, then this method is completely useless. And by doing what they now have done, they've shown that the rules change all the time, so I fully expect this, just to really make sure that there is no hiding for Free plan users.
Frankly, with storage as cheap as it is these days unlimited storage is not much more than table stakes. (And I'm seriously curious how measuring size would affect performance that drastically. Surely they weren't recomputing size on every rebuild? Wouldn't once per minute or hour be enough?)
But lack of private documents is surprising. I'm almost always okay with open-sourcing things (and have written a few FS in Community Spotlight), but even I've been considering selling some designs on Shapeways, and would need private documents for that.
Most confusing is not offering an intermediate plan given the apparent number of people (though reading the forum is a biased sample of OS users) who would be willing to pay for an intermediate plan. I'd certainly be one of these after graduating. It seems like OS would keep the pro users regardless, the okay-with-everything-open-source users regardless, but would gain both a user base and some revenue from those willing to pay for the intermediate plan. And those are probably more likely to then try to implement OS for startups/at their work/etc. I don't see the downside, am I missing something?
PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University