Onshape employee here. I agree with another poster that for most "non-professional" requirements Onshape's free tier is all one should need - sure, the documents remain public if you don't pay. It's prohibitively expensive to maintain the technology stack with the complexity, scale and performance that Onshape does, and its costs a lot of money. :)
Documents being public is one thing. But I remember you guys changed the ToS at one point (I just looked it up, in 2016) where the verbiage is that Onshape owns the IP of these documents which is a huge no for me. I rather pay for solidworks hobbyist for $100 a year that comes with 3Dexperience which performs very similar to Onshape.
I don't know where you see such a line in Onshape's ToS. Can you point me to it? IANAL (and speak only in an individual's capacity who is hopefully reading the same ToS), but the public documents you create as a free user are essentially in "public domain", so even though you still 'own' it, you grant a broad, "worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party" to use the intellectual property within that document "without restriction". This includes the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of it.
You can get SolidWorks for $25/year if you're a student or vet. It's full up re functionality, but with a non-commercial license. I highly recommend.
Taking the chance: As a hobbyist with a decent CNC with no intent of using it for commercial work: Linux "support" was driving me from Fusion to Onshape. CAM is driving me back to Fusion.
Please consider pushing the idea of having CAM for the hobbyist level in Onshape in your company, I know there's not much in revenue us hobbyists, but I'd gladly pay up to 20-50 per month for such a license. At least that's more money than 0 :).
I'm sorry, as far as I know the leadership is pretty clear on that. For a foreseeable future CAM will remain a Pro only feature.
I gravitate to open source, native or self hosted applications. But I have to say that onshape is really neat.
I just do relative simple object for 3D printing, every few month. And onshape was easy to get into.
From BRIO connectors for my nephews wooden train set, book binding helpers for a coworker, case for LED controllers .. easy peasy.
Just fill pattern and text are always a struggle.
But I just know, at some point Onshape will start charging us freeriders.
> But I just know, at some point Onshape will start charging us freeriders.
- I don't know about that, may be, may be not, but I don't know of any such plan in the short term at least. It gives University students a free 'professional' license so there's that too.
> Just fill pattern and text are always a struggle.
Feel free to create a support ticket about your pain points. Everyone can easily do that, and Onshape is surprisingly more responsive to support tickets than many other companies.