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.

There's also Fusion 360 that's free for personal use. SolidWorks is better and worth $50 / year if you use it a few times, but for a one-off project, Fusion 360 is pretty good.

The issue I found with Fusion360 is that I don’t own my files. You used to be able to export locally but last I used it (a few years ago now) I was unable to export a file in a native fusion format with saving to the Autodesk cloud being my only option. This is hazardous as not only am I now at the mercy of Autodesk but they also expire files after just under a year so in need to ensure I’m logging into my account regularly just to keep some things that could happily live on a local disk.

They are on your disk somewhere. Search for files with an f3d extension and you will should be able to find them.

You should also be able to export an f3d archive as long as it’s a standalone design (ie not linked to other designs).

However true that might be, I’d rather try to avoid wrestling with software for my data. If that’s really the case then even if it’s free I’m pretty sure you’re not getting your money’s worth.