Life after subscription

[gerard]

So,

I'm in a kinda odd situation where my employer has been reimbursing me for subscription costs for my personal seat of SolidWorks. We're a consulting company, and in the customer office that I'm ensconced in, I'm the SolidWorks guru (weenie). Access to the VAR who actually sold the seats we use is not available, so having access to SolidWorks support via my personal license has been useful at times. (Not lately though)

At the end of the 1st quarter of next year, I'm punching out for retirement. LOML and I are building our retirement home, and when it's done we'll move to that location and call it done.

I'll be able to get one more subscription payment covered before then. So, effectively I'll be covered under subscription until end of February in 2024. I went for a period of time way back when, without being on subscription, so this isn't exactly new.

The support that I've gotten from MLCCad has become fairly laughable of late. I filed 4 support requests this year and they were only able to provide a solution for one of those, and that was in relation to login's to the SolidWorks portal. The other 3 I either got the shoulder shrug, or I figured it out before they bothered to respond.

I'm very diligent about keeping entire copies of SolidWorks for installation saved on my NAS box.

I'll use my static seat of SolidWorks as long as it makes sense after that. As I won't be collaborating with anyone, interoperability "shouldn't" be an issue with files from "newer versions". Most of the downloadable content on the innerwebs is in the way of step files.

Any thoughts on the path forward? How long will it make sense to use an old version of SolidWorks?

thanks

g

[Frank_Oostendorp]

I am still using a 2013 version, which is my last, private perpetual version of SolidWorks. Needed a bit of work to get it running under Windows 10. So, next major change on operating system might end the use of your 2024 version.
No wait, your boss probably pays the 4 years of subscription in one go, so you're good up to 2028.

[Frederick_Law]

Run SW in Virtual Machine.

[Steen Winther]

I am still using my SW2014Pro license professionally almost every day. I have reviewed newer versions, have had access to a Maker license until recently, and my conclusion is, that there are almost no new features that I want and absolutely no new features that I need in later Solidworks versions.

The new cloud based services looks interesting, but it is not Solidworks and you may as well go somewhere else when you need to relearn everything anyway. I don't trust DDS to deliver a stable and affordable service given their appalling customer relations in later years.