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Anyone using Onshape for real yet?

traveler_hauptmantraveler_hauptman Member, OS Professional, Mentor, Developers Posts: 419 PRO
Has anyone committed a commercial project of any significance to Onshape yet?

If so, put a dollar amount to your reply. If Onshape went dark tomorrow, how much money would you have to spend for employee time to rebuild your project in your 'normal' CAD to keep your customer?

(ie open source, hobby, and internal projects don't count)
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Comments

  • traveler_hauptmantraveler_hauptman Member, OS Professional, Mentor, Developers Posts: 419 PRO
    For me, < $100.
  • Research_01Research_01 OS Professional, Mentor, Developers Posts: 301 PRO
    Yup 10's of thousands... Can't say for what but it will be in Theaters in 2016 ;) 
  • _Ðave__Ðave_ Member, Developers Posts: 712 ✭✭✭✭
    About $5000 and with 75+ documents it's a bit of a mess, Hoping that Onshape has some some sort of document management soon. My SW is a bit outdated and I don't wish to spend the money on updating. Wishful thinking or not I don't believe that Onshape will be going dark so I'm all in.

    Keep Onshaping
  • jonathan_stedmanjonathan_stedman Member, Mentor Posts: 65 PRO
    Time invested in real project - $10000.  However this is in parallel with SW modelling.  Doing the conceptual design and design creation in SW.  Then when happy, remodelling in OS from scratch ( not importing SW model) and adding Mates.  Creating Assembly in OS as I am really getting the hang of the new mates and like their speed.

    Main reason for putting model in OS is future ease of collaboration with suppliers and version control with suppliers, so I am easing them in gently.  Most are not tech people and having a simple browser based CAD markup  is within their scope.

    The new comment improvements have come just in time.


    Jon
  • billy2billy2 Member, OS Professional, Mentor, Developers, User Group Leader Posts: 2,014 PRO
    edited July 2015
    Bits and pieces of real projects. Waiting for the assemblies to be cleaned up. 

    I have a customer that's thinking of buying 3 seats of SW. I'm trying to push them towards OS.

    They do medium sized assemblies of prismatic parts. OS is really close to handling these types of projects.

    I have less than $10,000 worth of a billable hours on customer projects using OS.

  • pete_yodispete_yodis OS Professional, Mentor Posts: 666 ✭✭✭
    edited July 2015
    I had an enclosure design I really tried to do in Onshape recently.  There were too many tools lacking on the modeling side to get the geometry I needed.  I have requested these features (https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/337/functionality-needed-for-metal-casting-and-plastic-part-design#latest).  I saw this as the perfect opportunity to work with those making the prototype parts for us, those that will be making the production parts for us, and our own in house personnel who will be responsible for machining the parts in production.  I was itching to use the comment capability and follow mode with suppliers.  I can still do that with uploading the SolidWorks design files, but it would have been nice to have the whole enchilada - that will come in time.  For now,  I use it for designs for a non-profit... fun things for a great cause and things near and dear to my heart.

  • christopher_owenschristopher_owens Member Posts: 235 ✭✭
    edited July 2015
    I put three small projects onto CADCrowd. Hoping to win enough prize money for a subscription!
  • traveler_hauptmantraveler_hauptman Member, OS Professional, Mentor, Developers Posts: 419 PRO
    @john_mceleney well played!
  • jnewthjnewth Member, OS Professional Posts: 5 PRO
    edited July 2015
    @john_mceleney Awesome.

    @traveler_hauptman I've invested ~100 hours moving from a 2011 SolidWorks design to pure Onshape for www.dropletlife.com. My labor is free, as co-founder. At this point, we're all in with Onshape.

    If Onshape folded or more likely got bought by a rich competitor anxious to shut it down, I wouldn't be that upset about the sunk cost. What would be painful is going back to a prohibitively expensive subscription model that doesn't make sense at all for my scale of business. It's giving up all the advantages of Onshape (first class collaboration, first class versioning, first class multi-part development) for a good modeler that has a barely adequate constellation of expensive add-on tools.

    For what it's worth, I'm not using Onshape for fun. I'm using it because (for my needs) it is already the better tool. My personal calculus was: What's the cost of NOT moving to Onshape? That price has been too high for 10 years now.



  • theodore_5theodore_5 OS Professional Posts: 1
    Hello,


    I'm the lead engineer at Inboard (www.inboardskate.com) and we're slowing moving from SW to Onshape. We have thousand of hours of development hours on Onshape and that represents a LOT of money. We are not worried about it though,  we believe their futuristic vision of CAD will take over other existing softwares. If you are worried about losing your files you can always back up everything as Step or Iges files on an hard drive!

    Cheers!
  • jim_christianjim_christian OS Professional Posts: 1
    I moved my company over to Onshape, and so far the experience has been excellent. I use Onshape for both simple mechanical part design, as well as complex and ergonomic forms. Sure, there are some manufacturing related features that are still missing, but we all know they are developing and releasing really fast. In the meantime, if we really NEED a specific feature that is still missing from Onshape, its no problem to jump over to our prior CAD system that still has a few months left on the active 1-year license. I really agree with @joshua_newth, and its obvious that my employees do as well. Without question they will start new projects in Onshape instead of our prior CAD system. Collaboration, file safety, and a better UI - its just a better tool for us.

    But to answer your question more directly, yes we HAVE committed our commercial products to Onshape. Here are my thoughts on cost analysis of Onshape vs. prior CAD systems:
    • Assuming that our files actually went "poof" and we had to re-design everything by memory, I expect it would take $1000-$3000 to catch back up.
    • In a more realistic (but still highly unlikely) scenario where Onshape let us download our files from the servers before shutting down, I expect the cost would be <$500.
    • But be sure to think about the efficiency gain of collaboration. Prior to Onshape, my consultant and I used different CAD programs to do our work. Sharing files was a pain to the point where it was easiest for one person to completely own a project. Then we would end up in a scenario where my consultant (high hourly rate) gets stuck doing a lot of design work that would have been better suited for another (lower cost) employee. It'd be hard to quantify that, but I promise you in the past couple months of development, this phenomenon could easily cost us >$1000!
    • Don't forget the lost hours caused by traditional CAD on an average workstation. Prior to Onshape we purchased a $3000 workstation to run traditional CAD, and our models can get complex enough that a single modification was literally taking 2 minutes or more to process. That time adds up fast, and again I would argue that the losses from this issue would account for a good chunk of change.
    In summary, I think any costs due to the unlikely scenario of Onshape "going dark" are quite easily offset by the efficiency gains of collaboration and superior computing power. In my opinion (and apparently that of my employees), Onshape is a superior tool that will end up saving us money and improving our design process. The missing features are a transient issue at best. Don't forget that Onshape has the best talent in the industry and its only a matter of time before everything you want is available (and probably designed better) too!
  • Adam1Adam1 OS Professional Posts: 1 PRO
    A lot of good comments here, so I will keep it short. Our company has completely moved to OnShape and we love it! The original question is hard to answer as our models have years of development from before our move to OnShape. I would estimate our team has put about 500 hours of work in while using OnShape over the past two months.
  • 3dcad3dcad Member, OS Professional, Mentor Posts: 2,470 PRO
    We use Onshape for designing new looks for our furniture, but actual detailed modeling is still done in prior cad system since the lack of standard parts, configurations and parametric dimension. It's hard to put price tag to our design since the created collection can sell next 10 years.

    I'm confident that Onshape will be our main tool and will probably increase our use of cad data since it's available in every device connected to internet..
    //rami
  • traveler_hauptmantraveler_hauptman Member, OS Professional, Mentor, Developers Posts: 419 PRO
    Great replies! It's cool to see that Oshapes features have reached critical mass for some of you!
  • luke_pluke_p OS Professional Posts: 1 PRO
    Our startup develops smart lighting products. We are using OnShape as part of our core product development tools. As some features like 2D drawing are still in the making, we also have other CAD tools, but OnShape is our core parametric CAD where we import parts designed in other tools and from where we export STEP files for production. For us as a hardware startup it is the most flexible solution currently available.
  • bergdesignbergdesign OS Professional Posts: 11 PRO
    I'm now using Onshape for my tool-free furniture manufacturing - Klevr Furniture. I'm a self-employed industrial designer, having learned parametric modeling on Pro-E years ago, but I've personally been using SolidWorks up until recently because of the huge cost difference between the two. However, I do most of my own design in SketchUp and only go to SolidWorks as the very last step when absolutely necessary because SW is so darned cumbersome to use. In contrast, Onshape has actually been fun and much more productive because it's much less restrictive in its workflow - it doesn't force me to do everything step by step the way it wants to when I'm trying to focus and conceptualize my idea, plus I don't have to open the manual every five minutes to figure out where functions are buried or the steps required to structure my model the way SW wants me to. Granted, Onshape doesn't yet have some desired features like sheet bending and stress analysis, but its sketching is plenty robust enough to fully define and constrain my CNC geometry (which I can't do with software like SketchUp), assemble and fit check it in 3D space instead of wasting raw material, then get both 2D and 3D geometry out of it in a stupidly short amount of time to go straight to a CNC router or a 3D FDM/FFF printer.

    This ease of use is really important for me because I switch hats constantly and have to stay proficient with every single aspect of my business, from conceptual idea to engineering to procurement to manufacturing to packaging to marketing to sales to delivery to support. Onshape fits well for me, being extremely productive while actually being fun to use which is not something I think I've ever said about SolidWorks. I have a moderate list of desired features for Onshape, but the fact that they're so responsive to feedback and that they seem to think things through before implementing features, I'm happy to now be relying on it for my business.

    If Onshape went dark, I'd likely go back to SolidWorks but I'd be pretty depressed about it. The cost difference isn't really significant - I'd just trade the monthly Onshape subscription for a re-enrolled and renewed yearly SW maintenance contract since I already have a seat for the standard version. I assume we'd have some warning, so I could just export my geometry as Step and re-build required sketches as needed for any revisions. I'd probably give Fusion360 a try, though, because it appears to have evolved quite a bit on the Mac since they introduced it a few years back, but I'd be hesitant because my experience with Mac versions of Autodesk products is that I couldn't always rely on them to function reliably or smoothly, something Onshape has somehow managed to do inside just a browser window.
  • kinsleymarkkinsleymark Member Posts: 35 ✭✭✭
    We've been designing some furniture and lighting pieces in Onshape with great success. However, until there is the ability to create drawings for our workshops (or the ability to share a quick link to view a model, like Fusion360), it has very limited real-world use for us. We are also limited by the number of active documents in the Free plan (but unwilling to pay for a Pro plan yet until Drawings are released). There are also some minor irritations (i.e. - not being Mac friendly is one).

    With that being said, we will absolutely be moving fully to Onshape! (from SolidWorks). Being able to design from an iPad as well as not ever having to purchase a node-locked "seat" of CAD again is huge for us. All of our designers are mobile, so this fits our business model perfectly.
  • brucebartlettbrucebartlett Member, OS Professional, Mentor, User Group Leader Posts: 2,137 PRO
    There are also some minor irritations (i.e. - not being Mac friendly is one).

    What do you mean not Mac friendly? 
    Engineer ı Product Designer ı Onshape Consulting Partner
    Twitter: @onshapetricks  & @babart1977   
  • brucebartlettbrucebartlett Member, OS Professional, Mentor, User Group Leader Posts: 2,137 PRO
    @john_mceleney Awesome.

    @traveler_hauptman I've invested ~100 hours moving from a 2011 SolidWorks design to pure Onshape for www.dropletlife.com. My labor is free, as co-founder. At this point, we're all in with Onshape.

    If Onshape folded or more likely got bought by a rich competitor anxious to shut it down, I wouldn't be that upset about the sunk cost. What would be painful is going back to a prohibitively expensive subscription model that doesn't make sense at all for my scale of business. It's giving up all the advantages of Onshape (first class collaboration, first class versioning, first class multi-part development) for a good modeler that has a barely adequate constellation of expensive add-on tools.

    For what it's worth, I'm not using Onshape for fun. I'm using it because (for my needs) it is already the better tool. My personal calculus was: What's the cost of NOT moving to Onshape? That price has been too high for 10 years now.



    Great looking product, I want one, or maybe 5.
    Engineer ı Product Designer ı Onshape Consulting Partner
    Twitter: @onshapetricks  & @babart1977   
  • navnav Member Posts: 258 ✭✭✭✭
    @joshua_newth just checked the video of your product amazing, nice gadget We need a few of those in my house.  :)
    Nicolas Ariza V.
    Indaer -- Aircraft Lifecycle Solutions
  • kinsleymarkkinsleymark Member Posts: 35 ✭✭✭
    There are also some minor irritations (i.e. - not being Mac friendly is one).

    What do you mean not Mac friendly? 
    While Onshape RUNS on a Mac (or any type of computer for that matter), it's not setup to take advantage of the Mac and be used like a typical MacBook owner would use it. There have been several forum topics about this - specifically about the trackpad issues Mac users have (https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/7374). But to reiterate a bit - Onshape requires a user to physically "click" (and drag) the trackpad. This is something that no other Mac program requires and is actually detrimental and hard to do for extended periods of time. A Macbook trackpad is hinged at the top and is not physically designed to "click and drag" (Read through the forum posts). MacBook trackpads (and honestly, many modern trackpads) make use of multi-finger gestures and "taps" - not "clicks".

    So overall it does run great on my Mac, but the input methods (ie. MacBook trackpad) leave something to be desired.
  • dan_wilsondan_wilson Member Posts: 2
    edited July 2015
    I founded AfterDark Technologies Inc. and use Onshape to design all of my products.  We've been working on product development for the last two of years and have invested about $100k so far.  We are launching our line of nighttime flag football products this summer/fall via Kickstarter.

    It's been great to be able to work from anywhere using any computer.  Some of my employees are remote so the cloud aspect of Onshape is very beneficial with increased access, sharing and version control.

    AfterDark Technologies is revolutionizing team sports by enabling your team to play anywhere, anytime.  With our products, your playing time is no longer limited by daylight or finding a lighted field at night.  Play Flag Football through the night with fiber optic jerseys lighting the players, LED cones defining the field and end-zones, and interactive technology.  When the sun goes down, the fun really begins.  

    Check out the website at www.afterdarktechnologies.com

  • matthew_loew_1matthew_loew_1 Member Posts: 14 ✭✭
    I committed to Onshape for the development of a pallet/dolly for a customer. A bit of the story is chronicled here: https://www.onshape.com/customers/tera-development-solutions

    Multiple generations of prototype components were developed with Onshape.

    I had fully committed to using Onshape even though there were gaps in the functionality compared to other commercial software. I wrote many enhancement requests through out the project and many have been addressed. 

    Ultimately, this was a multi-million dollar effort for my client.

    I am looking at additional projects now where I feel Onshape will be ideal.  
    Matthew Loew
    Tera Development Solutions
  • pete_yodispete_yodis OS Professional, Mentor Posts: 666 ✭✭✭
    It's been fun reading the comments here.  Thanks for the great post @traveler_hauptman !
  • traveler_hauptmantraveler_hauptman Member, OS Professional, Mentor, Developers Posts: 419 PRO
    I've really enjoyed the comments as well!
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    There are very few of my projects I can yet do in a remotely realistic timeframe in Onshape. As I've said previously, once (in the areas where it is currently lacking) it is approximately a match for Solidworks 2003 -- including productivity at putting out drawings -- I can start really switching over.

    So for now, for me, it's just niche projects and lots of "rats and mice" models. Essentially my focus is on spare-time testing the functionality, partly to have a headstart if and when Onshape makes the grade, and partly to help my other aim, which is to become a useful member of the troubleshooting and enhancement-suggesting community.

    My primary motivation for the latter (whose opportunity cost I do not, and do not want to, count) is because it's in my long-term interests for the product to take off and really fly, thereby turning 3D CAD into a commodity and a universal language.
  • christopher_owenschristopher_owens Member Posts: 235 ✭✭
    edited August 2015
    @traveler_hauptman  @andrew_troup  @brucebartlett  @lougallo  @3dcad  Just submitted to a GrabCAD contest! Now if I win or place, at least I showed Onshape!! Plus a "shout out" on LinkedIn!
  • matthew_menardmatthew_menard Member Posts: 96 ✭✭✭
    @traveler_hauptman  @andrew_troup  @brucebartlett  @lougallo  @3dcad  Just submitted to a GrabCAD contest! Now if I win or place, at least I showed Onshape!! Plus a "shout out" on LinkedIn!
    Ha, I'm working on something for that challenge too.  I got started in Solidworks but changed my mind and am now giving it a go in OnShape.  Your entry looks great, good luck with the contest.  We'll see if I can wrangle up the time in over the next month to finish up my entry. 

    On the topic of using OnShape "for real", my work will probably never switch because it took until I started three years ago to stop using AutoCAD and completely transition to Solidworks.  Even at that, up until about six months ago, we were still saving out our Solidworks drawings to AutoCAD, which purchasing would then convert to PDF (crazy, right?).  However, I have been putting money aside for a seat of Solidworks for myself, to try and go out on my own.  Using OnShape for the past few days has made me really reconsider that, despite being a fairly big Solidworks fanboy.  I can't wait to see the 2d drawing module.  Once that is out, I'll be able to really make a decision about which software package is best for me.  Keep up the great work, I hope OnShape is a boon to hobbyists and small one person shops that DS/Solidworks doesn't seem to have an interest in listening to the needs of.
  • christopher_owenschristopher_owens Member Posts: 235 ✭✭
    @matthew_menard Actually I always "printed" the SolidWorks drawings to PDFs, because everyone has Adobe Reader! I was a HUGE Pro/E user inside Caterpillar, and SolidWorks at two smaller companies that I convinced to purchase SolidWorks. Like you, I wanted to freelance but the cost of SolidWorks (I did get a quote) and all the hardware required was...cost prohibitive! I even told Onshape, in a phone conversation, that Onshape has COMPLETELY changed my need for hardware and internet providers! One word... FREEDOM!! Now I don't HAVE TO sit inside another company and make use of their software/hardware! I don't even need to sit in an office!! Time clock..bah! Long lunch...sure! Golf on Friday...you bet!!! Cubicle politics....GONE!! THANK YOU Onshape!!!
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