topic Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

jodom4 — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:29:20 GMT

UPDATE Sept. 25, 2020: STEP Export stays in Fusion 360 for personal use

STEP export will remain available for Fusion 360 for personal use. This removal of STEP export was previously announced as part of the changes to curb misuse of Fusion 360 for personal use by commercial users. This change had unintended consequences for the hobbyist community. For this reason, we have made the decision to continue to allow STEP export for personal, non-commercial users. It remains in product unchanged and will not be removed as other announced changes roll out this October and January.

We want you to know, while the changes to the personal use entitlement were necessary, we remain committed to our community. You will continue to see development and investment in Fusion 360 for personal use.

___

UPDATE: There have been lots of discussions on social media and on our forums. We understand the emotions you’re all going through, so in the spirit of clarity, I want to break it down for you with the most accurate information about what is changing, directly from our team.

Here are 8 quick answers to the most common questions we’ve seen in the community.

1 – Is Fusion 360 for Personal Use still free?

Yes. Fusion 360 for Personal Use remains free. It’s not going away.

2 – What does the 10 active documents change really mean?

You still keep your data and can have unlimited number of documents (3D design, drawing, PCB) as well as projects (top level folders in your data panel) in your account.

Today all your designs and documents are active by default. You can open any design no matter how old or new and they will open.
What this change means:
- 10 active documents means that you have 10 spots for any document to open and be editable at any given time. All your other documents will be stored in your projects in a new inactive state. They will remain yours, saved in your projects.
- When you reach your 10 document capacity, and you want to revisit an older design and open it up, you can do so by deactivating an active document and activating the inactive one to swap places with. Again, you continue to keep all your designs and projects with no limits on how many you can have in inactive state.
- PDFs, images, presentations, spreadsheets, etc do not count towards the 10 active document allowance.
- If you have an assembly with referenced designs in it, the assembly and each reference (if opened) will count as 1 document each. Assemblies can reference active and inactive documents. You will still be able to edit the referenced designs as long as they are also active. If your referenced designs in the assembly are inactive, you can still open your assemblies, but the references will be read only.
- Electronics Design Library, schematic, 2D PCB count as 1 document.

How would this work?
- The interactions of how you do this is still being worked on, and any existing experience around archiving projects from Fusion Team is not indicative of what this new interaction may be, that’s why it’s slated for January 2021. We hope that you understand that we are trying to put limits in place to stop commercial mis-use, while still enabling the vast majority of hobbyists to continue to design and make with little to no impact.

3 – Can I still machine parts?

Yes. 2, 2.5 and 3 axis milling will still be available in the new Personal Use offering.

More advanced manufacturing functionality such as 3+2 axis, 4 axis, and 5 axis milling will only be available in the paid subscription.
Toolpath simulation in the Manufacture workspace is not going anywhere and will still be available.
Automatic tool change capability will not be available, and rapid feedrate are limited to cutting feedrate.

4 – Can I still 3D Print?

Yes, STL Export will still be available in Fusion 360 for Personal Use.

You can still use Fusion 360 for 3D printing with File > 3D print > send to print utility of your choice, File Export > STL or Save As STL

5 – Can I still laser-cut or do 2D routing?

Save As DXF is still available from sketch.

DXF will not be a supported file format from File > Export, but you will still be able to right click on a sketch in the browser and select Save As DXF for your laser cutting and routing needs.

6 – Can I still export my designs as STEP?

Yes, STEP export will still be available from the in-product File > Export dialog as well as Fusion Team.

Export of STEP will be not be available from the in-product File > Export dialog on Oct. 1, 2020. After Oct. 1, You can still export your designs as STEP file formats via Fusion Team in your browser. This workflow will remain until Jan 19, 2021. ~~To get to your Fusion Team page, open the data panel, go into one of your projects, and click on the “Open on the Web” icon.~~

7 – Does Extension Access mean Scripts and Add-ins?

No, you still have access to scripts and add-ins downloaded from the Autodesk App Store, there is no change here.

You will still be able to leverage our API as well as the add-ins available on our App Store.
Extensions in this context refer to the Manufacturing Extensions available to purchase. These are the capabilities like Probing, 4 axis Rotary, 5 axis Steep & Shallow Strategies that extend your manufacturing capabilities with more convenience, faster machine times, and higher quality finishing.

8 – Are there changes to Education, Startup, Trial & Paid Subscriptions?

There are no changes to these offerings.

Just to clarify, this change does not impact the trial, Education offering, Startup offering, or the Paid subscription. Product updates will continue to be delivered to all of our offerings, additional advanced functionality may be excluded from the Personal offering moving forwards.
We will continue to support the Personal Use offering with product updates, improvements, fixes, as well as new features moving forward.

____

Hey everyone,

As announced on the blog, soon we'll be making some changes to the Fusion 360 for Personal Use offering. We’re making these changes so that we can continue to offer Fusion 360 for Personal Use free of charge, clearly differentiating between what’s available in each offering, which we hope will reduce confusion, misuse, and abuse, whether it was intentional or unintentional.

If this is your first time hearing about this announcement, we encourage you to check out our blog post for the full announcement as well as our FAQ, where we answer more specific questions in detail.

> See the blog post announcement

> See the FAQ

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 16:35:28 GMT

Hey, reading through the blog posting, it looks like we're losing DXF export capability? That's kind of the thing that I use the most from the software, that's what most lasers use to drive their cutting... And without STEP export, I can't work around that to get the lines through third party.

Are you just removing the export of DXF drawings, or the ability to export a sketch as a DXF?

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

brianrepp — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 16:48:36 GMT

@Anonymous Restrictions on DXF files are for exporting 3D models and drawing sheets as DXF. If you are using DXF for subtractive manufacturing through exporting a sketch, which is still supported for Personal use.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 16:53:10 GMT

Phew! Thank you for the clarification, I was getting really worried because that looked like it was going to kick the legs out from under my whole toolchain!

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

lichtzeichenanlage — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 17:02:35 GMT

Removing STEP removes the ability to archive projects. Horrible decision.
Document limitation will kill many open source projects.
All the other things you've basically removed with the last license change, because the pricing doesn't makes sense for private use.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

fulcrumusa — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 17:56:53 GMT

Honestly, this feels like a huge slap in the face of the Personal license users.

Autodesk releases a free-for-personal-use tool, which naturally starts to build an ever-growing user base due to it's capabilities (as published initially) and as part of that ever-growing user base, it continues to get improved due to the work and help from that same user base. The Personal license users are just as invested in the product as any other and dedicate time and effort to improve it.

Now that Fusion360 has build such a large user base, Autodesk has slowly been restricting the Personal license to the point where it's hardly usable for many. I can't pretend to know what it takes to develop and improve such a tool but I have to think that Autodesk would continue to do so for it's paying customers with or without the Personal license users. So, it's not like they are expending effort and money to just release a product for free.

So, to attempt to push everyone to a paid license after so many have invested so much time and effort into improving the produce feels like a greedy money grab. Shame on us for believing that Autodesk will support its Personal license users. This is why I have always been and will always be a supporter of open source. FreeCad (for example) is not nearly as polished or feature-full as Fusion360 but it will always remain as open as it is today.

Great job Autodesk!!

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

untrustedone — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:00:28 GMT

Can you clarify what the 10 active documents means? do all my models become inaccessible?

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

stevenrradtke — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:04:04 GMT

So, I'm most confused about the 10 active file limit. If I'm reading the FAQ correctly it means I'll need to keep turning files "active and inactive" to keep only 10 active at once. But to be clear:

No files are being removed?

We can still keep more than 10 in our library of projects?

Once a file is marked "inactive" it can always be turned active again to work on it?

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

lichtzeichenanlage — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:12:57 GMT

My understanding is:

A document is either a design or a drawing
Active documents are not archived files

This would mean that you can have:

One not archived project, containing 4 design, 5 drawings and one assembly file.
One project containing 8 designs
10 projects, each containing one design
Any mix of those scenarios as long as you don't have more than 10 design / drawing files

To reduce the number of active documents you can archive them. Still takes up cloud storage.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

lichtzeichenanlage — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:22:39 GMT

I know I haven't participated much in the forum in the last time, but I did a lot a while ago. The document limit says clearly to me, that Autodesk has no interest in privates to do this anyway.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

lichtzeichenanlage — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:25:24 GMT

Working on my export add-in? Not sure about this... I'm using 9 design files for regression tests to test the add-in. This doesn't leave much space for my projects.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

lichtzeichenanlage — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:28:20 GMT

https://github.com/WilkoV/Fusion360_ExportIt

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

untrustedone — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:48:16 GMT

I personally do not use drawings, but it seems like a one page drawing is absurdly restrictive.

On the design limitation, I guess the alternative is to have 1000 components in a design.

Being a retired engineer, having a nice cad package is nice, but not worth $400.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 19:03:29 GMT

Yeah... I guess I just don't *need* the functionality badly enough for $300 or $500 a year for my home shop. I don't really *like* using Onshape or the other freeware stuff, but that's just more than I can swing for what amounts to very basic model-assemble-draw-export functions that are basically first-generation Solidworks stuff.

Losing the industry-standard export formats that let you use models with other software and the extreme limitation on project size... I'm not quite sure what to do after that. I will still be able to use it for designing some of my simple laser-cut projects, but most have more than ten pieces in the assembly, so that's just kinda it. I'll need to find another alternative, since I am not paying that level of subscription for stuff I won't use, and there's no lower-level subscription. $10mo/$100yr as an option for basically keeping the existing free version? I'll sign up for that now. But not $3/500, I just can't afford that.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

sundansx — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 20:49:59 GMT

Please rethink the lack of .step file export. Model sites like Thingiverse really need to move to .step file storage, as anyone that has imported an .stl file and tried to modify one would know. I know some people that have started to put .step files on sites like those and that has aided respins and mods. If Fusion 360 kills that, I think it would kill the future of any improvement to data sharing, due to how popular the package is. for printing, .stl are fine. for design, .stl files are for the birds.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

jodom4 — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 21:03:04 GMT

Hey stevenrradtke,

That's correct, no files will be removed. You'll be able to have as many documents as you want in inactive mode on top of the 10 active. Any inactive document can be swapped with an active one.

We're still working on the details of how this is going to work and what the experience will be. I'll reply to this post when we have a Feedback Hub topic on it, we'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

lichtzeichenanlage — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 21:08:23 GMT

Just a little note: 10 is very low number. Example: For my export add-in I've a set of 9 test files for regression tests. This wouldn't be possible anymore with the limit.

Edit: Participating in this forum means working on designs, too. Often more than just one.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 17:50:30 GMT

It's a shame people are still doing this same scam CON.

Give it away free to the user then when there is enough free user we silently restrict it and sell it to them.

Shame on AutoDesk. Shame on you.

Nothing in this existence last forever and the desk will be broken soon from its greed.

Today your up, tomorrow you shall fall flat on your bottom.

GREEDY

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

pete.oxenham — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 21:33:57 GMT

The CAM changes seem fair to me. If you are able to pay some other company $10k+ (at the very least) for a machine with multi-axis, probing, and/or an ATC - I think it's fair to say that you can afford to pay Autodesk ~$300/yr for their software.

Re: Changes Coming to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - Blog Post & FAQ

kevinPTMMY — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 21:54:40 GMT

When you do clarify this please also tell us how the active limit relates to design references. I.e., can an active design have references to an inactive design? Can a reference be updated to current while the referenced design is inactive? I actually think you are confusing things with the use of the term archive since that term is clearly defined currently to be an operation on projects. It sounds like you are planning to add a new attribute "active" to designs where only 10 designs can have that attribute on at a time. Is this essentially what will be happening?