"Today, solidworks decided to piss off ALL their 500 partners."

[KennyG]

If only there was s competitive product that has a really good SolidWorks migration tool

[SPerman]

If I can find a way to justify the expense of switching, I will also find a way to justify the cost of NX.

[peterbrinkhuis]

I had a few chats with the partnership leadership team over the past months, so I thought I’d update my previous predictions:

@peterbrinkhuis

What will this change for CAD Booster?

• With the current pricing for my product Lightning (€160 or €220 per user per year), they are demanding 20-30% of my revenue.
• It’s less bad for Drew (10%) since it’s priced higher, although they don’t specify how they handle monthly subscriptions. Edit: they DO explain how to handle monthly/quarterly subscriptions.
• I have to start registering everything for them, which is a lot of work every quarter.
• I have to share my sales numbers and revenue numbers with them.
• I have to kill our free add-in TimeSavers

• They promised me they will only charge 10% of revenue for normal add-in products. The $50 lower limit/fixed price is only for free add-ins that connect to big, paid products. They tell me it’s to charge companies that use/abuse the free solidworks ecosystem.
• Our free TimeSavers add-in is allowed to stay since we only use it to market our paid add-in products.
• The first 10k of fees is waived, which is nice.

@andrmollo

Hi! Does anyone knows what this would mean for open source frameworks line SolidDNA or xCAD?

peterbrinkhuis

Yes, open-source software is fine and exempt.

[bnemec]

Thank you for the update.

[sloworks]

If I understand it correctly, new terms (new FAQ on SW partner forum) exclude free add-ins’s. That’s a relief.

[KennyG]

Anyone seeing the backlash of this yet?

Hexagon just sent a letter stating they are dropping all direct SolidWorks functionality and moving to using only SW file import for their CAM products because of the new 3rd part license agreement.

[bnemec]

Same here. I was tasked with investigating what this means for our tool room. Sounds like the add-ins EC to SW and SW to EC are both no longer developed. We can continue to use the existing version. Until it doesn’t work of course.

Dassault is intentionally destroying the second main reason we justified changing from the Red Headed Stepchild of a “main stream” CAD system to Solidworks. Namely, “Solidworks has a vast ecosystem of third party supports and integrations making it the most popular CAD system.”

[len_1962]

All the crap that is happening with the CAD\CAM industry feels like were back in the late 80’s early 90’s having to monkey fart around to move files between software. between loosing CAM, AKA HSMWorks, and now a simple file open SW, these companies are “F”ing with those that help make them.

[jcapriotti]

Software is now mature and there aren’t a lof of new features or new customers to upsell to. So now we are seeing them squeeze customers by raising license costs, maintenance costs, forcing paying for cloud services, and adding this new cost on 3rd parties which ultimately ends up back on customers. If the 3rd party drops out, then Dassaults cloud tools become the only game in town so they get $$$ that way.

[len_1962]

[KennyG]

That’s how you boil a frog! You don’t just turn up the heat abruptly because the frog will realize he is being cooked and will jump out. You make minor slow adjustments over time so that the frog acclimates and thus doesn’t realize he is being cooked.

[Frederick_Law]

SolidFrogged

[SPerman]

I had #task for years, but last year there was an insane price increase, I assume due to this. Who knows how many other customers made the same decision I did.