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Changes To Onshape's Plans

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Comments

  • michael3424michael3424 Member Posts: 674 ✭✭✭✭
    Like most of the replies before me, I am quite disappointed at this news.  I'll continue using the free plan for a while as I get up to speed on Fusion 360, but I was just beginning to see Onshape get most of the features I wanted.  I'm actually a little ticked off at all of the time I wasted learning the product.  And *very* ticked off at having to replicate the 2 private documents I created in Onshape to another CAD product.


    I am so disappointed that I am on the verge of crying, why can't we at least have a reason why Onshape is so convinced that a middle tier plan is out of the question? 
    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.



  • steven_3steven_3 Member Posts: 1
    Signing in, simply to say I am moving to other platforms. No maker friendly plans. Rhino and fusion 360.
  • mischlmischl Member Posts: 28 ✭✭
    edited November 2016
    very sad - like changing the rules while the game is on. I am very disappointed too.

    when i was evaluating a tool for me as a maker with a 3d-printer last december, i found this interview with mr. hirschtick @jon_hirschtick that convinced me that onshape is THE tool: http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/11157/Jon-Hirschtick--Onshape-is-the-New-Generation-of-CAD.aspx

    he stated:
    We built Onshape with a focus on professionals, but we also welcome DIY users and makers. Although Onshape’s most significant impact will be speeding up the design and promoting more innovation for commercial products, our Free Plan still offers an unprecedented solution for DIYers and makers. By the way, many makers are tomorrow’s startups

    and:

    If a CAD user works alone and doesn’t need collaborative tools, there are many other advantages to working with a full-cloud system. 
     
    I trusted them - foolish! I let the 'unprecedented' through the translator again to be sure to understand the meaning correctly. From the interview I never expected that the free plan could change to worse (from my point of view). Argghhh.

    the new free plan is like bicycling without a saddle, sure you can do this.

    I invested also a considerable amount of time to learn Onshape. In the meantime, we introduced it also in our (small) company with a pro licence.
    so in future i will do my really private work in this business account. Cloud data you can access from everywhere and with no installation has truely real benefits.
    I would be willing to pay a fee for some private documents (~20$/mth).

    The day will come that Onshape has to earn real money from real customers. Then the middle-tier candidates are somewhere else. And never will come back nor become a first mover with OS in their professional environment - by the way, many makers are tomorrow's startups.

  • HakroHakro Member Posts: 67 ✭✭✭
    I am an early user since public beta and now after this second change of FreePlan deeply disappointed of Onshape.
    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.
  • michał_1michał_1 Member, Developers Posts: 214 ✭✭✭









    I was kidding...

  • mischlmischl Member Posts: 28 ✭✭
    edited November 2016
    in the intro, jon wrote: Finally, maintaining and debugging the code that implemented storage calculations and limits was taking real R&D time

    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.
  • ron_petersonron_peterson Member Posts: 4
    This is very sad and very short sighted at a very important time in developing your market. I am a professional self employed design engineer, I use top end cad packages Catia for one, which obviously cost a lot to invest in and are necessary to my business. I was actively encouraging my customers to work with me on on shape with a view to future small projects and in time this would have lead to pro contract being purchased by my self and others working with me  but I cannot and will not be investing any more time and money in onshape now as I cannot afford to purchase multiple systems and I will now have no options but to drop my recommendations to other major companies and engineers. If however you had an intermediate step offering a cost effective way to private documents then you would have kept my interest and that of my colleagues.
    Very disappointed.
    A very short sight.
    Not impressed having been singing your praised
    Good recommendations are hard won
    Bad recommendations spread far far quicker.
  • iro_271iro_271 Member Posts: 1
    Jlabs said:
    Obviously OnShape doesn't care at about non-professional users, makers, or hobbyists. Removing private documents from free plans is fine, but not offering an affordable pricing tier for non-professionals who would prefer to work on their designs privately is pretty crappy. Off to Fusion 360... 
    Completely agree, with this pricing policy is very difficult for a small company that wants to start.
  • Darren_A_HenryDarren_A_Henry Onshape Employees Posts: 64

    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.
    Hi @peter_hall , Onshape is actively working on Sheet Metal. We are not publically stating a date of release, but sheet metal is a priority and we expect you will see the capabilities soon. I would like to talk to you offline about your specific needs. Please reach out to me directly at dhenry@onshape.com.
  • nyholkunyholku Member Posts: 58 PRO
    Obviously sad and misguided in my view.

    Most everything has been said so I won't repeat all that.

    But to me the most worrying aspect is that this is the second time the rules have been changed and this will make a lot of people question the whole cloud model where you don't own your data. 

    And that may be a big problem for Onshape, more for them that for the users, if they loose credibility they are sunk where as me as a user will just move onto some other CAD system.

    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

  • c_17c_17 Member Posts: 10 EDU

    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.
    Hi @peter_hall , Onshape is actively working on Sheet Metal. We are not publically stating a date of release, but sheet metal is a priority and we expect you will see the capabilities soon. I would like to talk to you offline about your specific needs. Please reach out to me directly at dhenry@onshape.com.
    @darren_henry
    Is there a way to be more open about it ? It's actually the same answer for over a year now. 
  • peter_hallpeter_hall Member Posts: 196 ✭✭✭
    Not a great deal to add. As a newcomer to CAD I investigated several options before settling on Onshape as my system of choice and initially I had no concerns about my work being public. Now my abilities have improved and I have produced some work related to small developments on my race car which I would prefer to be private. My options seem to be to switch to another system, with another learning curve or to save my hitherto private work publicly. Presumably meaningless project names ("Xp99BntC2" as opposed to "F3_wing_stay") will help hide them in plain sight among all of those public documents? A paid scheme as announced won't work for me; a paid scheme where I could pay to keep 1 or 2 documents private might. Nothing I am doing is patentable so I don't find myself having to leave,as some people no doubt will, but I signed up in the understanding that some of my work would be private, where are my 'grandfather rights'? Impressed with the system, disappointed with the politics.
    @brian_jordan I truly sympathize with this position. Whether it be your ideas or customer information it is now impossible to protect unless prepared to pay $1200 a year. Often the design work a hobbyist or small business is doing is unpaid work. Onshape is assuming we all make income from the design work. This is not true yet so they need to rethink this move and alter it.
  • c_17c_17 Member Posts: 10 EDU

    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.


    @jon_hirschtick
    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 ? 

    kustaa_2 said:

    And that may be a big problem for Onshape, more for them that for the users, if they loose credibility they are sunk where as me as a user will just move onto some other CAD system.

    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?
    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 :) 
  • nyholkunyholku Member Posts: 58 PRO
    peter_hall said:
    information it is now impossible to protect unless prepared to pay $1200 a year. 
    Actually I think 12 * $125 = $1500
  • peter_hallpeter_hall Member Posts: 196 ✭✭✭
    kustaa_2 said:
    peter_hall said:
    information it is now impossible to protect unless prepared to pay $1200 a year. 
    Actually I think 12 * $125 = $1500
    The original post indicated $1200 if you pay annually, this is what I was referring to, agreed if you pay monthly it will be as you say $1500.

  • Darren_A_HenryDarren_A_Henry Onshape Employees Posts: 64
    You are correct @peter_hall.  Onshape Professional is $1200 when billed annually.  
  • mahirmahir Member, Developers Posts: 1,291 ✭✭✭✭✭
    You are correct @peter_hall.  Onshape Professional is $1200 when billed annually.  
    Comedy. Of course nobody from Onshape pipes up except when it comes down to the bottom line.
  • daniel_splawskidaniel_splawski Member Posts: 66 ✭✭
    There seems to be a lot of users willing to pay for a small number of private documents.  I certainly fall into that category even though I've never used private documents.  I'd be happy to pay 5-10$ a month just to support Onshape as it's one of the most convenient platforms I have ever used for modeling.  Additionally, a paid option for dedicated makers would make me feel more comfortable using Onshape for future projects.  My fear is that one day the free version may disappear or be further restricted and that would be devastating for users who have invested a significant amount of time in learning the Onshape tools.  If there were a revenue stream connected to the Maker/Hobbyist user base, Onshape would have an incentive to maintain a healthy relationship with these users and the users would have more confidence in the future direction of the company.  

    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.  
  • bernie_apodacabernie_apodaca Member Posts: 3
    Considering that the original Onshape cloud-based model worked so well, isn't Onshape just handing the concept to their competition?.... committing digital suicide????      If Autodesk initiated the same concept, wouldn't Onshape go out of business?  It doesn't make sense!!
  • øyvind_kaurstadøyvind_kaurstad Member Posts: 234 ✭✭✭
    Asking Onshape to reconsider is most likely futile. They may reconsider some time in the future, but by then a lot of the current users will have moved on. Most likely this decision means that Onshape feels they have reached critical mass of Pro users (which is what generates short term revenue), so making the Free plan completely useless for anything but open source designs makes sense to them. The useful idiots (like me) who has helped promoting and contributing to the community (and many has done a lot more than me) are now no longer needed, as they have enough Pro users.

    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.
  • mahirmahir Member, Developers Posts: 1,291 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Asking Onshape to reconsider is most likely futile. They may reconsider some time in the future, but by then a lot of the current users will have moved on. Most likely this decision means that Onshape feels they have reached critical mass of Pro users (which is what generates short term revenue), so making the Free plan completely useless for anything but open source designs makes sense to them. The useful idiots (like me) who has helped promoting and contributing to the community (and many has done a lot more than me) are now no longer needed, as they have enough Pro users.  
    I think you're on to something. It's almost like OS is purposely driving the free users away and trying to make us feel like it's our idea. Getting the non-paying users to leave, while it seems idiotic long-term, is an easy way to focus resources on paying customers. They'll need fewer servers, and service tickets from free users won't clog the support pipeline. It's a short sighted strategy to say the least, but I'm starting to see some misguided method to their madness. 
  • bountybarbountybar Member Posts: 1 ✭✭
    You are correct @peter_hall.  Onshape Professional is $1200 when billed annually.  
    So we know you are out there watching this thread as the  pricing correction was made in 30 minutes. How about removing the corporate gagging order that is quite obviously in place and engaging with your users?
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