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Comment by jonpurdy | Hacker News Reader

I’m looking for a recommendation to get beyond TinkerCAD (for 3d printing). I learned it in 2019 and came back in 2025 when I got my own printer. It is comfortable and fine for my purposes but lacks basic things like chamfer and fillets.

Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid).

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Try FreeCAD one more time, if you haven't tried 1.0+, and it might stick. I've finally, in the past 6 months moved all my work to FreeCAD and KiCad after trying both many times over the past decades.

I highly recommend watching one of MangoJelly's beginner videos for FreeCAD, even if you have CAD experience. It made it very clear how to adapt my Fusion360 skills.

OnShape is pretty approachable, and has lots of good tutorial videos. They offer free accounts for non-commercial use with the caveat that all of your documents must be public.

If you haven't tried FreeCAD recently, it's gotten a lot better in the past couple of years. It seems to have hit escape velocity, so to speak, and is improving rapidly in a way it hadn't for a long time.

> They offer free accounts for non-commercial use with the caveat that all of your documents must be public.

Major caveat! Also online access required.

And if you decide to upgrade, the next tier is 1,410€ per year.

For that amount of cash, FreeCAD can abuse and torture me quite a bit. Lol.

Also at the rate FreeCAD is developing and improving now, if more people would drop just 1k€/ donations into FreeCAD/OCCT, chances are your pains will ease rather sooner than later.

I'm not spending weeks to learn a proprietary, online-only software that will lock me out as soon as they need more money. Been burnt before on those kind of stuff

I would recommend pirating SOLIDWORKS and learning with that. It has the easiest UX of the parametric CAD modellers, and once you know the general sketch-extrude methodology you will find the others a lot easier.

Actually I think they have a hobbyist subscription which isn't totally extortionate now if you want to stay legal. Maybe get it for a year.

The new 1.1 update seems markedly easier to use.

There's also a soft-fork which some folks are funding:

https://www.astocad.com/

You may try onshape that is supposed to have a better accessibility than fusion 360, but unfortunately it doesn't seem that a CAD software with a complexity intermediate between tinkerCAD and FreeCAD an dthe pro CAD software exists

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