Beware the Onshape sales team they fone constantly .... -----Original Message----- From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] On Behalf Of RussellMc Sent: 20 July 2016 09:21 To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public. Subject: [OT]:: Onshape - subscription based Solid Works competitor ~=3D $US?100/month Possible interest to some. Forwarded from a private email from a friend. Not an 'ad' - and I'm not a likely subscriber. Ken said: I just got something today from the folks that publish NZ Engineering News magazine - promoting a cloud-based 3D CAD system which aims to take on SolidWorks head-on. The CAD system is called OnShape and they claim it works on pretty much every operating system and device, and can read existing SolidWorks etc. files. It appears to have been developed by a group who left SolidWorks to go out on their own. It would be interesting to know the full "back" story to that. It was apparently released in early 2015 so I'm a little surprised that I haven't heard about it until now - especially as I did a survey of "free" 3D CAD earlier this year and didn't come across it. OnShape is nominally a subscription system priced at $100 (presumably US$) per month - but you can have a "free" account which is targeted at hobbyists, "makers", and anyone wanting to evaluate the system. The only catch with the free version is that you are limited to 10 private documents (occupying up to a total of 100MB). I'm not exactly sure what that means yet but I assume you can only create a maximum of ten unique design files. That may or may not be prohibitive depending on what they allow you to do i= n terms of taking copies of design files from the cloud, deleting them from the cloud, and restoring them to the cloud. If you can do a backup-delete-restore cycle reasonably easily then ten active design documents may not be too much of an inconvenience for occasional use. You can however have an unlimited number of public documents (occupying up to 5 GB) - and as far as I can tell those are the only significant limitations of the free version. In particular there is no time limit, and no lititations on functionality. It seems to me that they might be better off to create an additional kind o= f user profile for people who can't justify the full subscription, but would like a larger number of private active documents. Maybe this will come. My main reservation regarding cloud-based subscription tools is the exposur= e you have to the tool vendor falling over or changing their modus operandi. At least with an owned tool you still have the use of whatever it is that you have purchased - but if you have become highly reliant on a subscription-based tool delivered via the cloud, and the provider goes brok= e (or whatever) you could suddenly find yourself dead in the water with no wa= y to continue. -- http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/chang= e your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .