Educational users have free cloud credits, so I presume they can use the extension. You can't buy cloud credits if you don't have a commercial license. They're putting features that before would have been in the base package into a 'manufacturing extension' that will require 'cloud credits' to license per month. They think that only students in college are 'educational' users learning CAD/CAM. It feels a lot like they've hired a new management team in sales and that team is applying the standard 1990s business school playbook to increasing revenue from Fusion 360 - subscriptions per seat per year, cloud pricing with no alternative, tiered software with commonly desired features at a tier above what a hobbyist can pay.īasically, they're setting up to increase revenue based on an imagined view of the users of the software - they seem to think we're all either home hobbyists with clunky DIY mills or startups with VC funding, or larger companies for whom the costs are acceptable because they're still lower than the competition and CAD/CAM is supposed to be expensive, anyway. It looks like Autodesk is taking a step backward, now that Fusion 360 is getting more mature (relative term).

Bit of a rant here, hopefully I have my math and facts correct.

Fusion 360 5 axis cam