What’s the vendor lock-in like with Onshape? My father used a “free” year of Solidworks and when it was over he was locked out from all his projects unless he paid. He uses FreeCAD exclusively now and is happy to own his files.
With Onshape unless you pay them money your files are public. You can’t use the free version for commercial use. Some advanced features are blocked like simulations.
I’ve been able to freely export .step files for anything I’ve made in Onshape. As another commenter said there are catches, like all your files are public if you’re using the free version and there are premium features that require payment. But it’s currently not locked down like it seemed Autodesk were preparing to do, where all your files live on their cloud only and can never be exported. For sure there is potential for the same enshittification with Onshape though, which is why I hope the freecad devs soldier on.
Also if you’re worried about your files being public, just name them with codes indecipherable to anyone but you. It doesn’t seem like the public file repository actually gets searched that much in general, and with a meaningless code the odds of someone finding and stealing a specific design are probably near zero.
What’s the vendor lock-in like with Onshape? My father used a “free” year of Solidworks and when it was over he was locked out from all his projects unless he paid. He uses FreeCAD exclusively now and is happy to own his files.
With Onshape unless you pay them money your files are public. You can’t use the free version for commercial use. Some advanced features are blocked like simulations.
I’ve been able to freely export .step files for anything I’ve made in Onshape. As another commenter said there are catches, like all your files are public if you’re using the free version and there are premium features that require payment. But it’s currently not locked down like it seemed Autodesk were preparing to do, where all your files live on their cloud only and can never be exported. For sure there is potential for the same enshittification with Onshape though, which is why I hope the freecad devs soldier on.
Also if you’re worried about your files being public, just name them with codes indecipherable to anyone but you. It doesn’t seem like the public file repository actually gets searched that much in general, and with a meaningless code the odds of someone finding and stealing a specific design are probably near zero.