Google may have received a little money from users who paid $500 for SketchUp Pro, a drop in Google's big bucket. Google cared little about making money from a CAD product and gave it away. Google acquired the original creators of SketchUp, to populate Google Earth with man-made objects, like buildings and towns. SketchUp filled a vital need and so grew to the have the biggest CAD user base in the world. It was not "exact," not a solid modeller, it was not robust, "you cannot document a big project," and it wasn't a "real professional CAD application" - meaning it was not expensive, as if free is a liability. Professionals criticized SketchUp for its imprecision and impurity. It was quite a feat for an upstart and showed no respect for the established order. Trimble says it has 38 million users.Ĭreated initially for architectural conceptualizations in 3D, it was readily adopted for all sorts of 3D design by anyone and everyone not already mired in "professional" CAD software packages, which then, lo and behold, attained a user base an order of magnitude larger. It is, by CAD standards, ridiculously easy to use. SketchUp has grown to become, almost by accident and under all radar, the most-used CAD software in the world. Oh, and the price of Pro now goes up from $500 to $590. makers, for which the product is named - so long as they don't actually ever sell their creations. In addition to serving the commercial market with SketchUp Pro, Trimble will continue to provide a free, entry-level, 3D drawing tool- now named SketchUp Make.įree use of the the current release of SketchUp is confined to students, hobbyists.
Trimble, who has owned SketchUp for two years, only said this in a May 22 press release: This means all architects using SketchUp may be in violation of the license agreement. With this change, we’re also clarifying that SketchUp Make is not licensed for commercial work. It’s available today and still free to use. SketchUp Make is the new name for our basic version. The FAQs issued with Trimble's announcement of SketchUp Make (a new name for what was commonly referred to as "free SketchUp") is this statement:
There was the usual list of improvements, a name change, but most significantly, it is not free for commercial use. SketchUp, known and loved by millions, was revised late last year. (Updated to reflect that free SketchUp was never licensed for commerical use.) How do you tell the largest CAD user base in the world that they they are going to cut off? You don't.
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