One thing I want to point out here is that (books aside), paint and bicycles are physical, rival goods- there are only so many bicycles, and creating a new bicycle means significant resources and manpower need to be used.

F360 is not that- if Autodesk somehow magically knew whether an individual was willing to pay $500/year for a subscription, there'd be little reason for Autodesk not to give everybody who can't afford it F360 for free.

Take somebody like me, for example. I am not going to buy a F360 subscription. But I want to learn CAD. (I'm familiar with OpenSCAD...but also familiar with its limits.) Previously, I was torn between FreeCAD and Fusion; now FreeCAD is clearly the best option for me.

So now I'm going to have FreeCAD experience, not Fusion experience. And any designs I release will be FreeCAD files, not Fusion files. And if somebody else happens to ask me for CAD help, I can't help them if it's Fusion, but I might be able to if it's FreeCAD. And any bugs I run into in FreeCAD, I might help fix.

This seems clearly worse for Autodesk than a world where I picked Fusion because of their hobbyist-friendly licensing. Not much worse! But worse.

The choice for me is not between paying Autodesk and not paying Autodesk. I'm not paying $500 annually no matter what! The question is whether Autodesk lets me use Fusion for my hobby/personal products, at no cost to them, or whether they push me towards a competing ecosystem. The latter seems like it makes everyone worse off, at least in my particular case- that's what makes this so disappointing.

This is the worst argument I've ever seen. "Bikes are physical but software is not, therefore it doesn't cost significant resources and manpower to be used".

Building and maintaining software costs money. The cost of hiring one engineer and paying them mid range income in Bay Area would equate to about 1000 hobbyists paying the ~$300 licensing fee per year. And it DEFINITELY costs more than one engineer to build and maintain good software.

For years companies tried to squeeze the enterprise customers more so that they can fund hobbies for others. And when finally they can't anymore and decide to charge for SOME FEATURES, while still keeping a freemium tier alive, everyone starts talking about the big evil corp.

You have to realize that companies like Autodesk keep so many products alive even when they are losing money on them (look up their financials) for years, quite thanklessly.

Sorry- my argument must have been very easy to misunderstand.

My point is that the marginal cost of a hobbyist user, who receives no support, is approximately zero. At no point did I say developing Fusion must have been cheap or easy! What I was trying to say is that those costs are unrelated to the number of hobbyists using the software- Autodesk does not need to hire extra engineers to let me use Fusion. (Support is the big catch here- but I don't expect support from a free tier!).

This is distinct from, for example, a mass-produced bicycle- there, yes, you still have NRE up front (design, hopefully testing, molds/tooling...), but a significant part of the cost of each bicycle is related to the cost of the input materials plus labor. That's not the case with software! With software, practically everything (again, support aside) is a sort of NRE- it's a fixed cost, no matter how many copies you make. Thus, if you somehow definitively knew that a particular customer will not pay for your software, and that their usage of it has benefits for you (greater adoption, the chance to convert them (or their employer) to a paid user later, etc) it would make sense to allow them to use it without paying- the cost to you is ~0 (mostly just bandwidth), but the benefit is non-negligible.

This is not true for a bicycle. If somebody cannot pay for a bicycle, and I am manufacturing bicycles, it generally doesn't make sense to give them a free bicycle unless I'm getting something else out of it that's worth at least as much as the cost to build one additional bicycle - i.e. the cost of parts and labor. But note that the cost to design the bicycle is not part of the calculation there- because it doesn't depend on how many bicycles I build from that design.

The distinction between rival and non-rival goods is very interesting, and I don't blame you at all for not understanding it. It can be counterintuitive!

Does that make more sense? Again, sorry if I was unclear!

Right. But there's a couple of things I'd like to point out.

1. These days, for Softwares, development costs are fixed, but there are also marginal costs associated with operations, especially when the product is on cloud. Yes, support is part of the equation, and different users get different amount of support, but that's not the only marginal cost. (Trust me even free ones get some support)

2. This move probably isn't about recovering back marginal costs. It's about recovering the fixed costs. The pricing model limits newer features like generative design to paid users, which is expected, because they need to hire engineers to build new features and maintain existing product. So they're limiting that functionality to paid customers. In the bike analogy, it would be something like buying accessories for your bike.

3. The change in pricing model does reflect what you're actually saying. There is still a free tier which allows for basic usage. But all the things that contribute to additional costs to the company are being taken away. You get 10 documents, but for more you'll have to pay. Because with cloud products, to store more data, they would probably either have to maintain servers additional servers or pay cloud providers for storage, in either case, it costs money.

Why would you move your product into the cloud if it only increased your marginal costs? You move into the cloud to increase your marginal revenue.

You've got this argument by the wrong end. You don't raise your prices because you had to because, well, cloud. You move to cloud specifically so you can raise your price. You might also argue that you move to cloud to reduce marginal costs of distribution, but that's arguable.

Your comment makes no sense in this context.

The people are not talking about free software as their right. It just sucks the price went from free to ~$300/y.

We all know Autodesk can do whatever they want. But they created an expectation by providing free features for years.

All they did is make people loose trust in them.

Most personal users will just move to other free or cheaper software.

US$500 actually, just currently on sale for $300.

I point it out because I do think that's a meaningfully different price point.

Not forgetting your Windows licence or MacBook.

Most features are still free.

And it definitely sucks SOME features went from free to ~$300/y.

Maybe it wouldn't have happened if ALL of its users paid some amount of money to use it. Or even better, it wouldn't have happened if a batch of the free tier users didn't abuse the licensing agreements.

Trust works both ways.

And I completely understand that users may want to move to a different software. But in any case, building software has heavy costs associated with them. Most free and cheaper software would either catch up with the pricing eventually or not have the same features or support to sustain the free tier. Good luck.

> Most personal users will just move to other free or cheaper software.

I keep hearing people—who haven't paid for software and encourage others to not pay—complaining that they will stop using it. What's the downside for Autodesk here?

Remember when Bill Gates started his new life as a philanthropist by donating tons of money to schools? Only it wasn't really money. It was lots of Windows licenses or Office licences that were worth a lot of money. So it arguably didn't cost Gates anything, but just grew future earnings. He kept all these students from gaining familiarity with the competition, encouraging them and their employers to buy licenses later for the product they had learned as a child.

There's the downside.

Short answer: Their software will lose mind share, and therefore market share in the long run.

Your implication here seems to be that Autodesk can't possibly be doing something bad because they have "families to feed", get a grip man. The idea that a billion dollar company is somehow financially equivalent to a mom-and-pop grocery store just a few lost purchases away from ruin and going through hard times is insane. The idea highly paid software engineers for a billion dollar company will suddenly be out on the streets, wearing barrels-on-suspenders by Friday all due to Fusion 360, not in a brand new job by the next week, is mostly ridiculous. People have got to get it through their heads that billion dollar companies do not operate by the same constraints as the rest of us, they aren't charging money because they need to, but because they can. "You" actually aren't a relevant variable at all and never will be, and neither is your purchase. That's how these things work, software or not.

They're charging an entry fee where there wasn't one before. They want your money, and decided this was a good way to get it from a userbase they already had cultivated. They aren't going to pay their software engineers more money or any of that, they aren't going to make Fusion 360 more "sustainable", they could do that overnight with the cash they have, so all of that stuff about "software engineers have families" isn't actually relevant in the slightest, that's just a scapegoat corporate wants you to believe in. They're just trying to get more money. It's that simple and has absolutely nothing to do with the product. If you can't see or understand why people might be irritated by that (an entry fee where none existed prior and where it's mostly just making billion dollar corporations richer than they already are), I suggest you try actually looking at the state of the world around you for once in your life.

> They're just trying to get money.

Yeah, that's how businesses work. Just because a company is a billion dollar company, doesn't mean they can give things away for free.

Last I checked, they're still a company that runs on losses. Seems to me, they pretty much need the money. Seems like you're the one who needs a reality check. Imagine, people walk in to wherever you work, and just because your place of employment makes millions if not billions, ask for free stuff? And then you give it to them for years, eventually asking money for a few things, all the while, still giving things out for free, and they complain that you shouldn't charge money because you already make money.

Besides, even in the Software industry, pricing can be different. There is a cost associated with product development. Softwares like games, where you expect millions of people to buy your product, you can price it at $60. That doesn't mean a niche software like Fusion360 can follow the pricing. It's fine if you don't want to pay that money, just know this, eventually it wouldn't make sense for them to continue making this software and they will shut it down.

> You bike as a hobby you buy a bike.

I did buy a bike in 2004 and another one in 2009. Both were pretty expensive so I don't shy away from spending money on hobbies I enjoy.

Thing is, today I still have both bikes and I still ride them both every week. I don't need to pay Specialized again every year just to keep using them.

Happy to pay for software, even somewhat expensive software. But it better work forever. I'm not paying for apps that expire and want me to pay again for the same thing. That's not acceptable in a hobby/personal market.

> I don't need to pay Specialized again every year just to keep using them.

The difference is that Specialized doesn't maintain or repair your bike and they certainly don't add new features/components to it over time. Those are services Autodesk is expected to provide.

The thing is there's some tools and technologies that humanity deserves to offer itself (a.k.a to develop a high quality OSS offering). Don't get scared by this statement, just bare with me for a second and assume it to be true. Humanity has offered itself OSS/copyfree/patent free technological gifts like an OS kernel, an SCM tool, an electronic CAD software, ML/data science packages, the wheel, etc. I posit that we need to produce long lasting artifacts that anyone, anywhere, can use and reproduce, especially if those artifacts are core to reaching our current technological level. This way, 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, we'll all have been the better for it.

A mechanical CAD software, I believe, falls in that category of "humanity should have this in OSS". I think Fusion360 being free and easily accessible made great strides toward this, in the sense that it sort of democratized access to CAD: a lot of people learned to use CAD with it. Now that "gift", which was obviously not free or OSS, has been rescinded and people are coming off their cloud, down to earth and telling themselves that yeah, it wasn't going to last forever and they ought to have known, and it's probably time to make put our hands at work toward making this tech an OSS asset for humanity.

My bike was free! For anyone reading this who needs a bike, people sometimes give away free bikes on Craigslist.

I read that comment too, and went -> Free books from the library. Free drawing at the community centre. Free bikes on craigslist/gumtree.

Granted someone is paying for this, or I have already paid for it out of my taxes, but the listed hobbies can be done for free with enough effort.

Err, there's still a free tier for everyone. There's also free tier with additional features for educators and students.

> Granted someone is paying for this

Yeah, someone does. So if you want free software, someone needs to pay. Free isn't really free.

You still pay for a library membership, or like you said tax dollars for community center. Free bikes on craigslist almost 90% of times needs investment. Let's stop pretending that hobbies are actually free.

All of those have incremental costs to reproduce. The variable cost for software is practically zero.

Yeah, because the people that wrote the software aren't worthy to be paid for their skills.

I don't get your point here. Why should some users pay and others not?

I think you meant "marginal cost", and in software it mostly comes from the cost of engineers and infrastructure that maintain, create, and deliver the software. Nowadays that includes bandwidth, storage, and compute for any cloud component. Software is only zero marginal cost if you create it, release it, and never touch it again.

> and in software it mostly comes from the cost of engineers and infrastructure that maintain, create, and deliver the software.

Those are all fixed costs, the cost of development is the same, regardless of whether you have 5 or 500 users.

> Nowadays that includes bandwidth, storage, and compute for any cloud component.

Download bandwidth, sure (though that can mostly be mitigated with BitTorrent). The rest, well, that's on you for building in dependencies on cloud bullshit.

Yes, cloud bullshit, which is currently running the world based on the size and scale of the cloud providers.

More users = more feature demand = more bugs = more use cases = larger development team. Engineering is only a fixed cost if you’re naive or an economics major studying for an exam.

To me this is more akin to whether you are allowed to paint or bike. It’s getting up one day and riding to your favorite trail only to find the owner decided to charge for it since it’s so popular. It’s in their right to do it, but a pretty bad faith move.

I was struggling to get past this first comment where the poster says:

> I have had various commercial, home-use and free licenses with Autodesk since about 1990.

If you've been using a product for 30 years and never paid for it, it's really hard to complain.

I'm not a big fan of Autodesk for various reasons, but if you are a hobbyist, there are affordable alternatives. If they need the more advanced features Autodesk offers versus competition, you can pay for them.

I can't find that comment for context- wouldn't a commercial license be paid (and home-use might be, too, considering they split it out from "free")?

Sure. But he also mentions free licenses which are indeed "free". He also says in the next line "Are any other free users..." which means he's on a free license now.

Yes there is plenty of entitlement in software, mostly from folks who have never run a software business. Queue video-game enthusiasts that think the $60 price of the game somehow facilitates providing content updates, bug fixes, and hosting multiplayer servers until the heat death of the universe.

There is significantly distorted public perception of the true costs of software. The hidden subsidies of advertising monetization and data collection have done an excellent job of this. In Autodesk's case, it was enterprise customers paying tens and hundreds of thousands for license seats, so that private parties could use it for free.

The alternative for autodesk may be to show Ads in the software, or collect data about what you're designing for ad profiles. I'm sure people would love that as an alternative.

Same here, for some strange reason we have a generation that feels entitled to be paid for their work, while actively refusing to pay for the work of others.

Which generation? Is that based on survey data about beliefs about intellectual property law in different age groups, or is it more of a hunch you have?

The funny part is that even if you could produce direct evidence for that, I guarantee that like most discussions about this sort of topic, the itty-bitty teensy-tiny fact that "wages have completely stagnated over the past 3 decades in the West and younger generations have less comparative wealth than ever before" somehow wouldn't enter the conversation for some reason. This isn't even debatable but somehow easily forgotten. Oh, and that's assuming it's a complaint about younger generations ruining things. Which it always, 100% of the time, is.

Like: Hmmmm, gee whiz, can't imagine why consumers who have been sold up the river into using nothing but ad-funded spyware freemium apps, funded with VC cash from Saudi Aramco but still losing $500,000,000 every second in the name of "growth", a generation who have less money than ever before with completely dead-end wages while cost of living continues to rise, might not want to pay for things. Surely the answer is that "They are entitled", because clearly they're all actually flush with cash, and just don't want to pay. There isn't any other possible other external factors involved, because "Society" isn't actually real, after all, and externalities don't actually exist. I'm a very smart computer programmer whose intellect should be taken seriously on these matters.

A hunch based on online discussions and sites like this one, dedicated to creating new business, but every time some posts a nice commercial tool, there are dozens of posts with copy-cats that do half of the work, but hey they are free beer.

This is a fascinatingly entitled attitude. So you think you deserve to be paid for doing the same as someone else, for a higher price, but worse?

Everyone deserves to be paid for the fruits of their labour.

Could you source or back up your claim that there are generational differences at work here? I don't really follow.

Survey of local coffee shops with laptops full of penguin and red devil logos, and common discussion threads every time someone shows nice commercial tools aimed at developers.

The guy in the original story has been using Autodesk for 30+ years and is currently on a "Free" license. I guess the generation which refuses to pay for other's work is Generation X? As a Gen Xer, I don't appreciate that generalization.

EDIT: Updated the comment about the amount of time he's been freeloading.

The comment you have been spraying all over this thread points out having commercial licenses, which are NOT free. Stop spreading BS

On re-reading it, I think it is less clear than when I originally read it. Regardless, it's a bit of hair-splitting because he's clearly been using the free license for at least a portion of that time.

I updated the comment.