I did a quasi-deep dive into licensing terms of the various suites. OnShape’s free tier is particularly clumsy, and on a facial reading bars you from using your own designs commercially, but allows you (and literally every other user) free rein on other people’s designs. It’s quite odd and will probably need litigation to sort out. Then they have nothing between the free tier and the $1800/year tier.

Fusion gives you, IIRC, a grace zone of a thousand bucks of revenue a year before it counts as commercial and you have to get the $600/year paid plan, which seems suspiciously close to how much profit a no-overhead side hustle might pull from $1000 of sales. Solidworks hobbyist gives you $2k of profit grace per year, and when combined with a Titans of CNC discount, makes it a pretty good option for the “let me sell a couple of things on Etsy crowd,” but it’s a much bigger price jump than Fusion if you need to get a commercial license (basically about $2000 a year, I think… sensing a pattern here).

Solid Edge keeps it simple and just says that the free version is for non-commercial use only, though as a locally installed app I’m surprised it’s not more popular.

I was continuing to struggle with FreeCAD, though it’s getting better with every weekly release, and they have a little bit of outside money coming into the project now. Still, I “treated” myself to a $700 permanent Alibre license. I like the workflow and the focus on the workbenches I actually use, and after ten payments I’ll be able to use this particular version however I like for as long as it runs. Not perfect, being closed source and Windows, but they’re a responsive small company in a crowded space, so I don’t think they’re going to fuck over the paying customers too badly.

Damn them too? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised they’re both in the enshittification olympics. I moved away from F360 in favor on Onshape a while ago but started muddling my way through FreeCAD when I heard about Onshape.