Fusion 360 Free Indefinitely Or Only A Year

Most Noticeable Is Fusion 360 Free RedditI have access to a copy of that at the shop. I may play with that a little because it has 4th axis support. It does not cost me anything to try as it's on the shop machine. I'm also looking at the underlying math. Direct g-code generation from Python. The paid version is the best value for small industry, advanced hobby users, and shops right now as Autodesk tries to undercut the bottom 1/3 of Solidwork's market. Especially since Solidworks tied up the Educational Pipeline, and most of the big users have invested in training, internal tools, data organization, etc. Yeah I freaked out about the license expiring, but it expires every year and then you renew it...

I was tired of paying $1,495 a year for 5 years and not seeing any return on that investment since SolidWorks hasn't done anything innovative in the last 10 years or so. They might take all CAM out of free fusion, and some people would be upset, but most of us won't even notice. If you paid $1500/year for Solidworks, you would have SolidWorks, but super weak CAM, no rendering, and no simulation. Those add-ons are over $4000/year to maintain, or about $12,000 to purchase a permanent license (which lasts approx. 3 years in practice). I also thought about taking a few classes to get the educational license for a few years. It's inconvenient but it works. All your designs are backed up on their servers. Yeah I realized I can reactivate my personal use license, so it is definitely functional for what I need again. The one you will probably notice most is the 10 active document limit.

Losing the ability to export STEP files is pretty damning though. It still exports to STL. You can still use more than 10 documents. It just sets the latest 10 as β€œactive” and older ones as β€œarchived”, but you can reactivate them with a click. I went through multiple autodesk architecture courses trying to learn Fusion360. I also tried multiple free ones on Autodesk's web site, and YouTube, but I still struggled with every design. 1 TNP issues are the absolute worse for new/inexperienced users. Even a shiny 'modern' UI can't help with that.