We are shutting down Ondsel

Every time I have a personal project and want to make a simple CAD drawing of a building or a simple model, as I would using AutoCAD at work, I go through the same song and dance. I look around at the options online, my jaw hangs open at the cost of any commercial CAD subscription/licence, then I get frustrated by a glaring lack of functionality or useability while trying some free/open source solution, and resort to a 30 day trial or MSPaint/paper.

Some of the comments already mention how blender's existence is predicated upon it filling a niche in certain senses, instead of trying to achieve feature parity with an entrenched giant. That makes sense, and it's unfortunate, as this space could use an open source option with Blender's polish. In my own industry, mining, I am certain some commercial interests would happily make their product an extension/plugin for a polished FreeCAD (or other), were it at that point.

What's wrong with Solidworks for Makers?

50$ a year sound perfectly reasonable to me.

Note: This is a bit of a "secret menu item" (not really but not well advertised).

It's available to people making less than $2k/yr from projects.

If you make more than $2k/yr, you need to pay standard prices, which start at $2.8k/yr.

"If you make $1,999 you owe us $50, if you make $2,001 you owe us $2,800" seems so obviously ridiculous it has to be wrong. Right?

Well, it's a non-commercial license. The $2000 limit is already kind of generous, especially since it's a profit limit and not a revenue limit.

Without having read the fineprint you could make a lot of revenue as long as you keep reinvesting the money into stuff related to your solidworks side-hustle (buying 3D printers, material, CNC machines, workstations, whatever).