With my subscription up next month, I’ve been trying out the free tier of Fusion 360. It will suffice for the handful of 3d printer designs I do a year.
But oh my is the interface horrible. I would pay a ‘hobbyist level’ subscription for Shapr rather than use Fusion for free, it’s that rough. However, it’s not £299 a year rough.
£120 a year, or £15 a month? For 3 designs and full quality STL export in Shapr? I’d pay for that even though it’d be the same functionality as Fusion for free (I value the UX).
I’ve now found a few folks who use Fusion for free to do their 3d printer designs [home/hobbyist stuff]. Have a think about that @Istvan — at a lower price point you could probably take a lot of free Fusion users.
In total agreement. The problem for me is that to get the $20 a month pricing, you have to pre-pay for the entire year. Otherwise, it’s $30 a month. Didn’t it just go up, too? I wish you would allow people to sign up for a $14.99 or $19.99 monthly subscription. I know it’s only a few bucks difference, but many people are just using it for occasional 3D printing, and can’t justify a year-long subscription commitment.
I know I’m personally sick and tired of subscriptions. Adobe is the WORST, but even Pixologic and SketchUp went to a subscription model. I’ve lost track of my subscriptions…I just had an unknown charge on my credit card (my fault, of course), and they canceled my card number. Now I have to go back and figure out who all is drafting my account for the subscriptions.
I still would love for @Istvan to consider the option I wrote a couple years ago…which is a free version, but you could buy “tokens” for a high-quality 3D model export. Maybe you pay $20 for ten tokens, which you can use as often as you’d like, and recharge when you need more exports. A lot of stock photography sites use this type of system.
The token idea is nice, but I suspect is harder to work into the current feature and billing systems. “Feature flags” in software, linked to billing systems, are the challenging bits to tie together.
At least with a hobbyist subscription plan it fits in with the existing structures. There’s clearly already the ability to restrict number of designs and functionality like STL export quality, so it would be a simple step for Shapr3d to change the ‘look’ [price point] of levels and not have to engineer anything.
It’s clearly a business choice not to do this right now, not a functionality choice.
In Germany we must pay for monthly subscription 45,99€ and yearly 349,99€. For a hobbyist is that too much. I hope they make a subscription for hobbyists with a amount what is payable. I would pay 240€ for a yearly or 25€ for monthly subscription.
I am using my car only for private / personal purposes (not for business), thereby I think I should be charged half the price only!
Do you walk in to your local BMW-dealer and complain about the prices and beg for a 50% discount, because you can’t afford their prices, or do you go to the Renault/Dacia-dealer and purchase a car you can afford?
I get your points - and I blame no-one for not being able to afford the subscription, BUT: If this software is not worth the price for you, you might as well use some of the rare cheaper or free options to model your 1-3 projects per year. FreeCAD might be no joyful experience, but it gets most of the jobs done.
If the S3D-Team decides not to cannibalize their existing subscriptions with a hobbyist-license it is their choice.
@Istvan Why not do like as AutoCAD do? With $10 you can buy some “tokens”, maybe 80 tokens. 1 token is equal to use 1hour of the app (8h of working time/day should be 8 tokens multiplied for 30 days is equal to 240 token and thats equivalent to $30 so it’s preferred to pay $20/mon to pro using but it has a justified use case for hobbyists). I am talking from Brazil, pay in dollar can be very expensive and I just want to build some pieces for 3D printing as a hobby for my own home and else. Let’s consider that I’ll use. Another way is to pay $3/mon (please use R$ BRZ currency without dollar conversion) and be able to export high res STL for 3D printer at least.
I am looking for Onshape because of pricing. But I really linked Shapr3D UX. Please solve this 1 year issue. Best regards.
I’m sorry, but the subscription costs me €48 per month and it doesn’t seem feasible to me as software for a certain use… I’ve had to use it for 3 months and I’ve already canceled the subscription. It’s by far easy to use, but the price that you pay per month is brutally expensive
I could see my way to pay $50 year for a Hobbyist subscription that had a limit of 1-2 projects per month. This 1-2 per month would limit pro users from using it without paying for it, it would also allow more casual users the ability to use it, learn how to use it, to grow into higher tier subscription levels. As an aside, I haven’t decided to spend any energy learning to use Shapr3D yet, buy I want too, because going forward is too big of a jump from limited free to $299 Yearly, I will be watching though and. I hope you figure something out, Thanks, David
Agree we should pay obviously. Swedish kronor equivalent is 519SEK / month in monthly payments. That is similar to 44 EURO or 48 USD. 20 USD I would gladly pay for the odd time I use it 1 or maybe max 2 months a year.
I’d agree, I can’t justify $299 / year for what I use which is completely hobby related (flight sim gear, creating arduino projects, etc) or creating random parts to use around the house. I’m certainly not making any money on anything I build (or even trying to).
My usage is sporadic… I might work on one particular project a bunch for a week or two and then not touch the software for months. Some periods I might work on a project an hour or two a week only, and do that off and on for a few weeks. It really depends what I’m doing for a particular hobby at a given time, or what random around the house part I suddenly decide is worth designing (eg: cookie cutters for my kid’s birthday).
Trying to create hourly usage rates or daily rates feels too stressful (even if logically it would work out well price wise) and would ruin the fun of designing things enough that I’d probably just look elsewhere.
Currently I’m using OnShape instead which allows for unlimited models but they are all ‘public’. It’s an ok trade off. I haven’t created anything yet that I really want to be private. That kind of helps with the issue of just calling yourself a hobbyist and then using the software fully.
Making a project limit doesn’t work for me either really. I design many small projects and I might not come back to many of them but I don’t want to throw them away either. I suppose some sort of archival mode and limiting to only 1 or 2 active projects at a time is tolerable if that’s helpful for enforcing a cheaper/hobby licensing.
I’m a software engineer by trade and I’m honestly very sympathetic to the fact that software isn’t free to build, so I’m more than happy to pay, and I’d love to use the software, but all I can really see myself paying is $50-75 USD / year at this point.
It would be great if you could figure out a way to enable us hobbyists to use the software.
It’s pretty clear Shapr3D isn’t interested in the hobbyist market. I mean, it’s not a hard nut to crack if you actually wanted to. There is just no interested from the vendor.
Vote with your wallets hobbyists, there are perfectly fine alternatives out there with sensible options for people like us.
Shapr3D is a startup company. I’m certain if you were running a startup, you’d have to make the same decisions for survival. Every “little” change has the potential for huge impact to the program. So there really isn’t such a thing as a little change anymore. A company must prioritize support where it’s revenue stream comes from. But I’m sure you knew that already.
I don’t think any hobby user would expect any kind of support when using free software… Of course if I was paying a usage fee I would expect proportional support to it.
