


You can also purchase Fusion 360 through the heavily discounted PD&M collection. I understand that it is possible to extend it for another year or have a foreseeable future licence. All prices were sourced from the Autodesk store and are in US dollars. I have a hobby licence that is going to expire on November 11th. Last edited by Neale 05-01-2018 at 11:46 PM. The table below contains the prices of single-user Fusion 360 licenses. I'm sure you will get lots of other opinions - this is a very personal area and what suits one person might not suit another. There are a number of different products in the Vectric range, and you can download trial copies if you are interested. It is designed for woodworkers rather than general engineering, and I still use it for some jobs as it is much quicker and easier than F360 (and is excellent for sign-making as its lettering engraving capabilities are very good).

That was 5 years ago and things might well have changed but I bought Vectric Vcarve and found it both easy to use and pretty powerful. When I first started using a CNC router, around 5 years ago, I tried a range of free software for both CAD and CAM. I hear good things about FreeCAD, but I haven't used it (I'm a F360 user for quite a lot of what I do). However, there are people who do not like this because data is held in the cloud (in practice, on Autodesk-managed servers) and there is always the possibility that the "free" deal will be withdrawn. Download the trial subscription and when it gets close to expiry, you can sign up for the free version. For home and hobby users, and small business users (can't remember the threshold but I seem to remember something like $100K/year turnover), F360 is free.
