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Comment by langitbiru | Hacker News Reader

CAD software is so expensive.

Rhino is $995. Fusion 360 is $297/year. Solid Works is $3995 with an annual maintenance fee of $1295.

Let's compare them to photo editing software and the likes.

Adobe cloud subscription is US$52.99/mo (all apps -> Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, etc). If you only need Photoshop, the price is US$20.99/mo. Affinity Photo is $49.99.

Nah, we have good opensource photo editing softwares like Gimp and Krita, a good opensource vector editing software like Inkscape.

References:

https://www.rhino3d.com/sales

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/pricing

https://www.engineeringclicks.com/solidworks-price-guide/

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html#

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/#buy

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I feel like this is comparing apples to oranges. A mostly 2D creative work environment, where it has to be good enough for the human eye versus a 3D modeling software that has to hold up against real world physical constraints.

It feels like comparing bycicles to cars and saying look how cheap even this high-end bike is compared to these cars! Different products and use-case.

Further, even if photoshop is the technically more challenging product with more advanced features it has a much bigger market than CAD software thus naturally R&D efforts have less impact on the endprice.

Completely OT, but isn't it surprising and interesting that the prices of high-end bikes and cheap cars are converging?

Moustache Friday Speed Bike: €5800

Citroen Ami: €6000

One way to interpret this is that bikes are finally in direct competition with cars; in Europe at least, it's very possible that bikes will win.

Citroen Ami is not quite a car, it's classed as quadricycle. For the sake of providing an example though, there are cars (recognized as such) having even a lower price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano

Affinity products are wonderful. Affinity Photo is not as good as Photoshop but it's getting there and prices don't even compare. Affinity Design is excellent. I usually draw 2D shapes in Design then export to svg into FreeCAD for extruding. Works perfectly.

Rhino is, in my experience, full of strange, hidden bugs.

Solidworks is fantastic but so expensive it's not worth considering.

Sure, because CAD software is dramatically more difficult to make than photo editing software or even video editing software, and it is a more niche product and it is mainly bought by large companies that can afford it.

Of course it's going to be more expensive. It does suck though. I wish Solidworks would do an affordable hobby license.

They do. For members of experimental Aircraft Association, www.eaa.org. And now that I know such a thing simply exists I’m completely fascinated with it!

Yeah I just found that. Unfortunately you cannot export to any non-native formats with the student edition you can get from there, so not particularly useful if you want to 3D print or laser cut anything.

Thank you. I’ve wanted to start using Solidworks for a long time. Just could never justify the cost. If you can’t export other formats that’s a big negative.

I guess I’ll be learning Blender!

Blender is a completely different thing. You can't do mechanical CAD in Blender. Don't try.

Honestly given Autodesk's recent crippling of the free version of Fusion 360 I think the best option is really just to pirate Solidworks.

Solidworks provides their student edition for free to hobbyists: https://www.solidworks.com/support/community-download#no-bac...

As far as I know, it doesn't have any features disabled but PDF and image exports will have a watermark saying that they are for noncommercial use only.

Imagine the 1980's when the packages were $10,000 and you needed a $50,000 UNIX workstation to run it.

It wasn't that long ago that AutoCAD was $1,995 (probably $3,500 today). And that was way cheaper than 'real' CAD software like Pro/E

I often feel like this. CAD software is almost expensive enough that I want to just write my own.

Which is, I guess, why it costs that much. The empirical measure of the value it creates, for me, is how much they can charge for it before I just do it myself. And Fusion 360 clears that bar.

Just wait until you find out what it takes to build a CAD program and you'll be happy Fusion 360 is only $500/year.

Soooo Photoshop is basically as expensive as Fusion?

Yeah, I think if you are going to use Photoshop, you might as well use other softwares like Illustrator, After Effect so you can use Adoble Creative Cloud Subscription.

Consider that SolidWorks is software used to design products where your tooling for a project can easily top $100k. Spending a small fraction of that on the software that actually allows you to design the product makes it seem relatively cheap. It isn't meant to be software focused at the 3D printing crowd.

CAD software is generally inexpensive compared to the price engineers are paid to use it and how much money is made from it. You have to also realize that the paying audience is relatively small and at the end of the day commercial producers of this software have to pay the bills and make a profit to make more software.

You could say the same thing about SWEs and basically all the free or low cost software we use to get our work done. And we’re usually paid more than the engineers that use CAD.

Doesn’t mean that CAD software should be so expensive. It’s probably holding the field’s growth from outsiders back.

Frankly, the work that most software developers do is a joke compared to what is done in even a low-end CAD package. Biffing a minor detail in Uber For Toothbrushes isn't a big deal. Biffing a minor detail in a wiring harness for a plane or military vehicle is a multi-million mistake that people may not notice until they actually attempt to put the whole thing together, or worse, after somebody is already using it. When you start talking about software that needs to work the first time, things get similarly expensive.

Shapr3D on iOS is free or $240/year for the pro version. I've barely used it (I use Solidworks for work) but it does use the same Parasolid kernel as Solidworks, Onshape, NX and many other serious CAD packages. https://www.shapr3d.com/

Thats unfortunate. However I guess it is because of the value those tools bring, makes them expensive.

3d is more complex than 2d. Flying a plane is way more complex than driving a car.

Try to make an jetengine with a photo editing software.

Try to edit RAW photos with CAD software.

Pretty pointless comparison.

Well the point I tried to make is that one software is used to build billion dollar products on which human life depends while the other one is just a CAD software (or was it the other way round :-) )

And both are simple products available in free variants serving non-overlapping purposes.

Solidworks is just a random and insignificant piece of proprietary software. Its core component isn't even original, but relicensed Siemens tech. It's popular because it's popular, nothing else.

(Plus, anyone can throw together a jet engine with a welding station from aliexpress and a few car spare parts. Now, if you had said space rocket, it would have meant something, but that's an insignificant percentage of CAD usage.)

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