Fusion 360 pricing for auto renewal

[David Aurora]

Just spent a couple hours trying to discuss this with Autodesk, but with no real solution.

My auto renewal came up today for Fusion 360. $615AUD, up yet again. OK, whatever, everyone is jacking prices up and blaming COVID, that's life.

But then I went to their website and it's $480AUD if you sign up now.

Same bullshit I noticed (too late) last year- when you subscribe they claim a discount for auto renewal. But every goddamn time my renewal comes up, it's substantially cheaper to just sign up fresh.

I understand introductory pricing to get new clients, but gouging an existing customer an extra $135 per year just because they have stuck with you for a few years is a bit rough.

I'd have thought that when I pointed it out they'd make some kind of offer to make things fair. But nope, their official solution was just to cancel my subscription and sign up with a new subscription to access the "discount".

No real point to this other than a rant, but yeah. Wow. I'm definitely going to try out a couple other options before I commit to re-subscribe.

[Jeroen3]

Yes, they have a perpetual 30% discount for new subscribers.
This is the same trick the ISP uses to lure you in. But there you can just go somewhere else every year.

[Doctorandus_P]

Maybe cough up the rental fee for the next year under a different name just before the old license expires?
I use open source software exclusively myself. It's also got it's down sides, but at least it does not feel like I'm being extorted or held hostage.

You can also consider donating some money to open source projects as an investment into the future even if it does not have enough functionality (yet) to use it. 3D CAD is a bit lacking in the open source community. FreeCAD for example has been improving steadily over the last 20 or so years, but there are still too many reasons why it has not reached version 1.0 yet. For many years the community behind FreeCAD seemed to be a lot of guys "just tinkering for fun", and it looks like they're now struggling to find a way to speed up the software development and make it more "professional".

[thm_w]

Can you use the same account to sign up again with once its cancelled? Or does it require a complete new email/login/etc. and have to port all the files over.
If its the second one thats a pain.

[asmi]

If you use it for business purposes, pay what they are asking and write it off as a business expense, if you use it for personal purposes, either re-signup every year, or dump it entirely and move to FreeCAD. I've done the latter about a year ago or so, and although initially it was not easy, but I persevered and now I feel quite comfortable in it, at least enough for my purposes (which is mostly designing stuff for 3D printing).

[David Aurora]

I tried to download Freecad- had repeated server issues with the download, then issues with the downloaded file itself. That was enough of a taste of things to come for me, I could feel frustration on the horizon. I'll try a few options though and see if any work for me

It is used for business, but writing things off as a business expense isn't a magic free money button, that's not how it works. Paying more is still paying more. I don't mind the actual cost as much as I mind the fuck you they aim at existing users. I don't use it that much (I'm still learning CNC/3D printing so I'm using it for a few prototypes, but that side of the business isn't really paying for itself yet), but if I was I'd say the pricing is reasonable overall.

My subscription has now expired and I turned off auto renew yesterday, I just followed the renewal link after launching F360 and was able to put the sale price subscription in my cart without issue. So yeah, it doesn't appear to require a new email address etc, an existing user can access it. So it's literally as straightforward as a price gouge for anyone who checks the auto renew button, unbelievable.

[langwadt]

If you use it for business purposes, pay what they are asking and write it off as a business expense, if you use it for personal purposes, either re-signup every year, or dump it entirely and move to FreeCAD. I've done the latter about a year ago or so, and although initially it was not easy, but I persevered and now I feel quite comfortable in it, at least enough for my purposes (which is mostly designing stuff for 3D printing).

yeh, if it is for business, the ~600$ a year should be in the noise

[thm_w]

My subscription has now expired and I turned off auto renew yesterday, I just followed the renewal link after launching F360 and was able to put the sale price subscription in my cart without issue. So yeah, it doesn't appear to require a new email address etc, an existing user can access it. So it's literally as straightforward as a price gouge for anyone who checks the auto renew button, unbelievable.

So not a big deal then. Now we know not to check auto-renew.

As mentioned above by Jeroen, this is standard practice from major ISPs, cell phone companies, banks, etc. The longer you are a customer often the worse your deal is, they don't magically call you up and say "hey price is dropped you should re-subscribe". OK some of the small ones do but most don't. Thats how we end up with people paying $50/month for 1mbps DSL to this day, because that was the price ~15 years ago.

Shitty business practices 101

[David Aurora]

If you use it for business purposes, pay what they are asking and write it off as a business expense, if you use it for personal purposes, either re-signup every year, or dump it entirely and move to FreeCAD. I've done the latter about a year ago or so, and although initially it was not easy, but I persevered and now I feel quite comfortable in it, at least enough for my purposes (which is mostly designing stuff for 3D printing).

yeh, if it is for business, the ~600$ a year should be in the noise

You realise not every business is Microsoft, right? For a sole trader, who is often at the mercy of clients paying on time, if I don't need to pay hundreds of dollars extra per year for something I'd like to avoid doing so. "Business" money isn't Monopoly money- for a business owner, more cost to the business means less money in your pocket, it's that simple. I don't know where people get this idea that things are magically written off by an accountant and there's no loss as long as things are purchased under a business name, it's bizarre.

[David Aurora]

My subscription has now expired and I turned off auto renew yesterday, I just followed the renewal link after launching F360 and was able to put the sale price subscription in my cart without issue. So yeah, it doesn't appear to require a new email address etc, an existing user can access it. So it's literally as straightforward as a price gouge for anyone who checks the auto renew button, unbelievable.

So not a big deal then. Now we know not to check auto-renew.

As mentioned above by Jeroen, this is standard practice from major ISPs, cell phone companies, banks, etc. The longer you are a customer often the worse your deal is, they don't magically call you up and say "hey price is dropped you should re-subscribe". OK some of the small ones do but most don't. Thats how we end up with people paying $50/month for 1mbps DSL to this day, because that was the price ~15 years ago.

Shitty business practices 101

Absolutely, I've definitely experienced that with phone plans etc.

This felt different though- the price actively goes up every year as a long term subscriber, but stays almost constant if you manually subscribe each year. Looks like now they're pushing their subscriptions with a promise of a 3 year price lock, but there's no way I'd want to agree to 3 years now knowing that next year it'll likely still be cheaper to let it lapse and re-start rather than auto renew.

The other thing is with telcos etc it's a simple call to update your plan, whereas these guys won't budge. They'll happily allow you to run out your subscription and start again, but they won't just give you that price (or even a compromise in between) on your account.

[langwadt]

If you use it for business purposes, pay what they are asking and write it off as a business expense, if you use it for personal purposes, either re-signup every year, or dump it entirely and move to FreeCAD. I've done the latter about a year ago or so, and although initially it was not easy, but I persevered and now I feel quite comfortable in it, at least enough for my purposes (which is mostly designing stuff for 3D printing).

yeh, if it is for business, the ~600$ a year should be in the noise

You realise not every business is Microsoft, right? For a sole trader, who is often at the mercy of clients paying on time, if I don't need to pay hundreds of dollars extra per year for something I'd like to avoid doing so. "Business" money isn't Monopoly money- for a business owner, more cost to the business means less money in your pocket, it's that simple. I don't know where people get this idea that things are magically written off by an accountant and there's no loss as long as things are purchased under a business name, it's bizarre.

but to put that money in your pocket you need to pay tax, so in hours of work how much is those few hundred really?

[David Aurora]

If you use it for business purposes, pay what they are asking and write it off as a business expense, if you use it for personal purposes, either re-signup every year, or dump it entirely and move to FreeCAD. I've done the latter about a year ago or so, and although initially it was not easy, but I persevered and now I feel quite comfortable in it, at least enough for my purposes (which is mostly designing stuff for 3D printing).

yeh, if it is for business, the ~600$ a year should be in the noise

You realise not every business is Microsoft, right? For a sole trader, who is often at the mercy of clients paying on time, if I don't need to pay hundreds of dollars extra per year for something I'd like to avoid doing so. "Business" money isn't Monopoly money- for a business owner, more cost to the business means less money in your pocket, it's that simple. I don't know where people get this idea that things are magically written off by an accountant and there's no loss as long as things are purchased under a business name, it's bizarre.

but to put that money in your pocket you need to pay tax, so in hours of work how much is those few hundred really?

Are you seriously saying it's better to pay more for the same exact same subscription, because "business"?

[asmi]

You realise not every business is Microsoft, right? For a sole trader, who is often at the mercy of clients paying on time, if I don't need to pay hundreds of dollars extra per year for something I'd like to avoid doing so. "Business" money isn't Monopoly money- for a business owner, more cost to the business means less money in your pocket, it's that simple. I don't know where people get this idea that things are magically written off by an accountant and there's no loss as long as things are purchased under a business name, it's bizarre.

I am a business owner, and I know how ecomonics work - if a software is saving me more money than it's cost, I have no problem paying up. $600 is about the cost of 6 hours of engineer's time, over the year that's not even noise, it's a microscopic blip on a balance sheet, hardly even noticeable. This is how businesses make decisions.
As a person I would never pay Autodesk even a single cent out of principle, but as a business owner I would have no problem paying whatever they ask as long as I get more out of it. Emotions and feelings are bad foundation for business decisions, only hard and cold numbers matter.

Are you seriously saying it's better to pay more for the same exact same subscription, because "business"?

For some businesses, the cost of service interruption can be much more than these $100. Autodesk knows this, and since they are B2B shop first and foremost, they can easily get away with such practices.
As mentioned above, the same line of reasoning is often used by other service providers, which, once onboarded with, can be hard to suffer service interruptions of, and so people pay up. Imagine how some gen Z'er would fare without an Internet service for a day!

[David Aurora]

You realise not every business is Microsoft, right? For a sole trader, who is often at the mercy of clients paying on time, if I don't need to pay hundreds of dollars extra per year for something I'd like to avoid doing so. "Business" money isn't Monopoly money- for a business owner, more cost to the business means less money in your pocket, it's that simple. I don't know where people get this idea that things are magically written off by an accountant and there's no loss as long as things are purchased under a business name, it's bizarre.

I am a business owner, and I know how ecomonics work - if a software is saving me more money than it's cost, I have no problem paying up. $600 is about the cost of 6 hours of engineer's time, over the year that's not even noise, it's a microscopic blip on a balance sheet, hardly even noticeable. This is how businesses make decisions.
As a person I would never pay Autodesk even a single cent out of principle, but as a business owner I would have no problem paying whatever they ask as long as I get more out of it. Emotions and feelings are bad foundation for business decisions, only hard and cold numbers matter.

Are you seriously saying it's better to pay more for the same exact same subscription, because "business"?

For some businesses, the cost of service interruption can be much more than these $100. Autodesk knows this, and since they are B2B shop first and foremost, they can easily get away with such practices.
As mentioned above, the same line of reasoning is often used by other service providers, which, once onboarded with, can be hard to suffer service interruptions of, and so people pay up. Imagine how some gen Z'er would fare without an Internet service for a day!

As a business owner, you know how every other business runs? Cool story bro. Whether or not an amount is a microscopic blip on the balance sheet depends on size of business, market conditions, other bills, and what the bill is actually for.

Either way, I already said above that I don't have a problem with the price itself- I have a problem with getting charged a significant penalty for remaining a customer with auto renew active (a mistake I won't make again with F360). It's simply shitty ethics on their part, and incentive to look at alternatives.

As for actual downtime, this is not a concern for me here. My bread and butter is repair work, I've just been training myself up in F360/CNC machining for custom stuff I plan to do as a side project/future thing so as it stands F360 has never made me money and I've been perfectly OK with paying for it anyway while I learn in spare time. Again, I don't have a problem with paying for software, I just don't like having to play chess with the supplier over pricing.

Still though, let's say I was reliant on it to put food on the table- does that really mean I shouldn't be able to trust them not to fuck me on the auto renewal price? I've gone back through my emails to make sure I'm not crazy, and sure enough I can't find anything from the last couple years that actually tells me ahead of time what the auto renew charge will be. Each year it's just a suck it and see thing, which I find shady as fuck given the perpetual "sale" price on the website. These are the issues I have with their practices.

[frogblender]

Just went through the same horsecrap myself.  I managed to get the "new customer" 30% discount, despite being a renewal.  All seems good.  Here's what I did (similar as what others have pointed out):

1. TURNED OFF AUTO-RENEWAL.
2.  Set my calender a day ahead of the expiry date.  On that day, I found the 30% discount, added it to cart, and bought it.
3. TURNED OFF AUTO-RENEWAL.
4. The old license expired thereafter, and all was good, and all cloud files were just as they were.

It is also prudent to regularly download all your fusion files from the cloud, just in case.  I used https://github.com/aconz2/Fusion360Exporter, which works OK (don't forget you actually have to click all the checkboxes of your folders)... although I couldn't open downloaded f3d's which referenced other projects (I didn't play around with it; perhaps someone else has a solution).

It appears autodesk scrapped any 3-year discount.

For the record:  the per-year price I paid now with the 30% discount ($382usd+tax) is 28% more than what I paid 3 years ago.  And IIRC, the price is supposed to go up again in 2 weeks (end of january).

[David Aurora]

Yeah I got all the recent spam about the price hike, along with a "deal" to get a pretend discounted rate and lock that in for 3 years.

They can absolutely fuck off at this point 

I flat out refuse to buy from a company that fucks around this much with their prices, it looks dodgy as hell and inspires zero confidence to stick with them