How Have Hobbyists Historically Afforded Autodesk Software?

Top Five Is Fusion 360 Free For Hobbyists Definition Of Woke Ideology Urban myths~ $300/year is not trivial, but it's more than reasonable if you're using it for "a lot" of stuff. I would say that 10+ projects in a year is using it a lot. CAM with FIVE-AXIS milling is a lot, needing to use the cloud for rendering is a lot. Simulation, generative design and custom extensions are a lot. If you're doing all of those things, you're definitely on the far edge of "hobbyist" and should be forking over some money.

You still pay for a library membership, or like you said tax dollars for community center. Fusion 360 is a free download. Is capable of doing anything a cnc hobbyist will ever need. I just created an acount. Installed the free trial.

"Bikes are physical but software is not, therefore it doesn't cost significant resources and manpower to be used". This seems clearly worse for Autodesk than a world where I picked Fusion because of their hobbyist-friendly licensing. I got my daughter up on F360 in a matter of minutes . They have a totally free 1 year license, so if you are learning, that'll get you much of the way through school. I guess they are lucky that people can't just do what they did with Photoshop in the 90s; yay for the cloud. How many people are really able to spend that kind of money on Fusion 360? Fair enough if you are one of the lucky few with thousands of pounds worth of CNC equipment in your garage. Switching to another commercial product would just be repeating the mistake on your part. I got stuck trying to create a bracket, very similar to the bracket tutorial. I was looking to Autodesk Fusion 360. Even opened a team for our family recently. I decided on that after looking at FreeCAD, Solvespace, OpenSCAD, LibreCAD, and a few others, each of which had a fundamental dealbreaker. Perhaps it will have to be FreeCAD after all. So, IMHO I _REALLY_ want an opensource solidworks/fusion360/etc competitor but at the moment its just not there yet. From the video's it looks like it should be, but once you start using it, its an endless ball of frustration. FreeCAD lets you do parametric modelling. Well as seeing all of your changes while you're making them. Also it's much more point-and-clicky, in the same way Fusion is, so it's much less confusing for a Fusion user to transition to FreeCAD rather than OpenSCAD. That said, OpenSCAD is phenomenally powerful, it just requires you to think in a particular way. I happen to enjoy thinking that way. Most of what I make ends up being OpenSCAD. I mostly use OpenSCAD to design parts, and FreeCAD to design assemblies and integrate parts into existing things. The most popular platforms also are more in demand for jobs.