Whose salaries, exactly? In most of the country, that's a couple months rent for an entire middle class family. I earn well, and I cannot imagine ever paying that much for any piece of software unless I needed it for a profit-making venture and the ROI was very obvious and very positive.
Fusion was initially (and still is to some extent) targeted explicitly at hobbyists. At one point the CEO made lots of noise about his commitment to the maker community. 'Course since then Autodesk went from a company run by a maker to a company run by a marketing dweeb and a beancounter.
Sorry, but Autodesk was always run by beancounters. They wanted their share in office products, and went lucky with CAD. Read John Walkers "Autodesk Files".
In the context of Fusion, it was the pet project of Carl Bass who is very much a maker. He constantly championed free access for hobbyists to Fusion 360. I suspect a big part of his departure was due to not having any path towards monetizing the huge cash sink that was Fusion. Bass' replacement was the chief marketing officer.
And how many of those saved weeks are being spent fighting draconian licensing software? In a past life I had a few architectural firms as clients and actually getting AutoCAD licensing shit to work was a huge pain point.
You need to balance those weeks spent fighting licensing issue (seriously?) against the time that's lost by using a piece of software that is a nightmare to use... if it doesn't crash. Which it does all the time.
Admittedly, it's been 2 years since I last used FreeCAD, but I've spent literally more than a hundred of hours with it trying to make it do what I wanted it to do only to come to the conclusion that mechanical CAD probably just wasn't for me.
And then I tried Onshape and, surprise, it wasn't me after all.
Irrelevant; such a license would be purchased by the business and wrote off as a loss on the income/loss sheet.
Needless to say, for a business a few or even several thousand dollars a year is practically nothing if it's critical to business operations and ensuring productivity.
If you're buying this for your own personal use? Yeah, you're gonna need a lot of disposable income or some really good justification. For your own small business use? Yeah, you're gonna need to justify that cost against your estimated annual income and other losses.
What's irrelevant to what? The actual market for CAD software is well funded businesses that are buying it as a productivity tool, so of course their approach to the cost is very relevant when trying to understand the pricing.
The context was the cost of a Solidworks license within the purchasing power of an average salary. Meaning the question posed was whether an employee could buy a Solidworks license.
To that, I say that is irrelevant because just like you said: It's the company that buys and pays for the license, not a singular employee on a salary.
The salary of the employee provides the basis of their cost to the company, so any tool that increases their productivity for a small portion of that cost is something they are going to consider.
I wasn't imagining that the typical person making $60k year would enjoy blowing thousands of dollars on a CAD package. This is why they aren't cheap though, because typical people don't buy CAD packages, companies do.
