this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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I’m using Fusion360, and I dislike it for a lot of reasons, but it’s easy to use. I tried FreeCAD, but it was very janky in comparison. Shapr3D was surprisingly good, but there’s no way I’m paying monthly for my hobby usage. I need precision prints, so I can’t just use Blender or similar.

Is there some magical unicorn software I’m not finding?

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[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 0 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Plasticity. It's the best balance I've found between cost and usability. And it doesn't force you to save your files on someone's cloud.

You pay annually and get updates but when your year is up you can choose to pay less for each subsequent year or stop paying and continue using the version you currently have indefinitely without future updates.

[–] mrcleanup@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

I was a SketchUp make guy back in the day and was able to stick with it a long time but it's so old it isn't working right for me anymore (Linux).

Plasticity is about the closest thing I have found. I paid about 175 the other day and plan to use this version for the next 10 years.

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 1 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

I did the Plasticity demo, but I got busy and forgot about it. Now I can’t do another demo.

[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

What's the unique identifier, email? Just use a different email address

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 1 points 1 hour ago

It doesn’t work. I’ve scoured my system and prefs and can’t find where it’s storing that I’ve done the demo. I’ve tried various emails. I’ll just run it in a VM I suppose!