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Comments
The one thing I miss the most from OS in F360 is the Final-button, that allows a preview of the rebuilt feature tree when editing a feature. I used this quite a lot in OS, and I miss it.
Lately I've been thinking about this pricing model, especially in context of cloud based application.
As hobbyist with reasonable income from day job I can afford easily my little hobbies. I have a nice little workshop with CNC plasma, two lathes and a decent size milling machine and everything that goes with them.
So I'm willing pay several $1000 for a tool just to 'enjoy' it.
When I die my heiress will sell the lathes and things but the software is worth nothing.
Further my machine tools may lay dormant for months, even years, but they are there when the inspiration strikes.
Now with a desktop software the thing is different because I know that within a year or two it will go sour.
A new version of the operating system comes and the software won't work and I will have to buy the next version of the software as staying with the old OS is a dead end before long and drags you down. I have several friends that are stuck at 10 year old OSes and cannot use new software because of that, but the investment on their software is too dear to give up so it is a ball and a chain.
So I end up paying for the software more or less continuously.
I also spend money more or less regularly on hardware and telecom, so why not.
A further problem is that every now and then a software company decides to completely overhaul a product stopping support of an old version throwing away all my investment on it.
A cloud based is slightly different, it will not go sour as it lives in the cloud but of course I'm still at mercy of the whims of the developers, if they decide I do not need a feature or that a feature needs a complete overhaul then there is nothing I can do. And it can happen without a notice.
As to cost of subscription based software, it tends to be huge. I bet most people hooked on Netflix or Spotify don't want to think about that if they are 30 years old they can confidently expect to pay 50 years the monthly payment of whatever it is. Even a lowly $10/month adds up to $6000 and nothing to show for it at the end of the day.
The same with CAD, if it is subscription based I would get hooked on it and would like it to be available at a moments notice. I would simply hate to put in hundreds or thousands of hours on some CAD design and not have access to it anytime in the future. Thus with todays Onshape subscription model I would end up paying (I'm +50 so no more than 30 years to go) $1200/year*30 years = $36000 ... could buy a decent classic Mustang or Jaguar for that money! Oops done that already but you get the picture.
So I have the means and I'm ready to spend but the pricing model does not work for me.
Not sure which kind of model would... it is a dilemma.
Have a nice weekend.
So two attempts have bubbled up to find another solid revenue stream. Services around software written at a loss...or subscription services.
For some software like word or excel...what services can you bundle around them? The only way to grow is to get more users. To do that you can make it more accessible....get rid of any prerequisite infrastructure or hidden costs....the cloud. You can also lower the immediate cost...a student can digest $10 a month a lot easier than $120 on time fee. This model relies on a month after month after month subscription.
For other software, there is a mirade of support software that you can create, bundle, develop around the main core. There are consultant opportunities. There are R&D components. For this software you can develop the core at a loss but make a tremendous amount of money around services. If you can use these services to save a user $10Million you can honestly and ethically, with your head held high, charge them $2Million for it. This model is usually focus on addressing a fixed industry/customer problem with a fixed deliverable at a fixed price.
Software is also a dynamic landscape. Software solutions that were cutting edge 3 years ago and would fit the services model are now commodity and have moved into the cloud/subscription model. A whole new set of services based solution then start to be developed at the high end. This seems to be an ever repeating cycle.
is Onshape's long term plan a never ending continual growth of subscriptions? Or does it just need to reach a certain number of subscriptions to keep development going and then the services model will start?
Intetesting stuff.
The same mass array of CPUs, memory, graphics, and disk that can be dynamically pooled, dynamically reallocated, reconfigured, and reimaged with minimal staff and maximum resilience is being stood up everywhere. This will in turn drive all software vendors to mod thier software to run in these environments.
The PLM versioning, effectivity, and configuration currently deployed at these OEMs is far far far more mature than what is currently in Onshape. Of course at a price point and support structure that costs orders of magnitudes more than Onshape.
It will be interesting to see if the promise of individual software vendors hosting complete environments takes off and gets a footing before those very same customers stand up a similar internal solution.
It will be interesting to see which philosophy is sustainable and in the end generating the most value add for the end user.
Will Onshape be able to grown an entire functional PLM suite in the cloud before the existing internal OEMs stand up thier own internal cloud underneath existing mature PLM infrastructure? Or is there an emerging hybrid work flow leveraging components from both solutions?
I don't see very bright future for cloud ecosystem so that everybody needs to find and create separate account (and always login) and pay for subscription into several systems.
Well yes and no, or rather no and yes
Can't name no names but I've got windows seat to a train crash slowly happening which is a big name PLM system being deployed and mature, effectivity and support are not what I would use to describe what I see and but price point is definitely a magnitude more than Onshape.
Yeah the support is there but when the software is what it is...
cheer Kusti
Onshape and F360 can do whatever they want with their company and products. They know their business much better than I/we do. I just think it's very interesting the completely opposite approaches to this market.
Onshape was the perfect solution for me. Free and no high end PC machine. 10 documents and 500MB worked fine and my my documents are private.
I don't like to make my documents public. Why should I?
First these are my menatl properties and second who cares about my constructions?
This is a regression and I am very angry that I have put time learning the programm and made my constructions with it.
All my ideas now are trapped and I can't export the files without losing all parametric geometries.
Onsahpe: Please consider the doubts of the community and rethink your dession!
Regard, Kurt
Buying a subscription was definitely my long term goal in order to be able to collaborate on multiple designs with multiple other people and I have encouraged them to get accounts and start practicing the functions as I have been.
Now, there is no reason to get a subscription at any point because even if you hadn't taken away the ability to at least create a few designs, they now would have to buy their own subscriptions just to edit my private designs.
This is terrible customer service honestly
Being primarily in software I do not expect people/engineers to write software for free. What the free plan did is allow me to deliver faster than pen and paper while pinching pennies. I have every intention of paying, but for something that makes business sense. Now that we are doing few integrations, since one adapter design works on similar product lines with zero changes, we don't use OS that often.
What is really confusing is not offering a limited plan for small startups. Something like $50/mo for a cap on private projects, 10, 20, 50 just something lower than unlimited. One size fits all doesn't make sense to charge where OS utilization is everyday as in heavy manufacturing shops/CAD firms, vs our setup where OS is a tool that we use, but not as our primary tool.
Since switching from OS to another competitor is a pain with just a few projects, I have no intention of changing down the road due the friction of moving projects themselves to retraining.
It's wrong to live with such an attitude.
1 year later, Onshape is still going awesome.
I really like how you can use Featurescript to create features.
IR for AS/NZS 1100