Same Sketchup you love……. well I loved the Classic perpetual licence so I guess I don’t love it anymore… As a one man band architectural practice here in the UK SU was providing some very nice results for occasional work. I can do my construction documentation much quicker and 3D modelling in ArchiCad as well but couldn’t financially justify their perpetual licence. Now I will just pay for a monthly subscription as and when I need it from AC and include that in my bill and save the faffing about between SU and LO. Bye bye old friend (SU) and forget you Trimble, greedy buggers!
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with SU8 customers still asking for an upgrade… a subscription surely does ensure a more constant cash flow, which is simply required for making a living from developing professional CAD software (Blender are mainly volunteers in their spare time)… but a browser-only version is surely suicide, at least yet.
Fair point, but the guys at SU (and they are fantastic in the dealings that I have had with them) are now owned by an international company (Trimble) that is quite financially boyant and no doubt paying the SU staff, so not really a result of shortage of cash or poor cash flow. Elon Musk said something along the lines of, if you keep being innovative people will want your products. Subscription, as far as I can tell is a way to encourage a lack of innovation, I mean look at the ‘improvements’ for the last version of SU… dashed lines and more grips…hmmm, what about hatch patterns for the section tool, like Scalp? etc. etc.
Nope, can’t see this as being a positive from the consumer’s point of view… sorry 
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the SU division needs surely to obtain the (majority of the) money they need by their own revenues/profit.
I dislike subscriptions for the same reasons posted here and will not be using Sketchup after my current maintenance and support ends at the end of the year. I recall a year ago when the push for subscriptions was made and being told there was still an option. I don’t use AutoCAD any more and have found a product less costly and gets the job done in the same amount of time. This broken promise (from last year) is reason enough to bite the bullet and learn Blender. I will miss the enthusiasm SU user have.
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Please take à serious look at Blender and you Will see that Sketchup is so amateur in terms of development
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I will agree, with You Helle, especially about the fixed income part. I certainly understand not wanting a subscription, unfortunately, these programmers, engineers, and computer annalist do not come cheap to keep up needed advanced programing. They too just as Trimble, need to make a profit. It is a miracle with all the extensions people the program works as well as it does. Their Genius (@last software) was they used videos in the beginning free! When talking Greed it should include hardware people as well, they are constantly improving speed via chips and processors. Which obviously, may not work with older software. Now Adobe is pure greed I will agree. They make more money than GOD. Never met anyone using the software that made that kind of profit! 
(Hi Olivier)
Trimble have lost trust of their client. Trimble change unilaterally the license and have sold more expansive classic license.
I reject without exception subscription for any software.
The 300$ is very expansive. I compare prices.
If you add PlusSpec BIM subscription, SketchUp (or CashUp ?) is much more expansive than Revit LT !
If you consider the perpetual license and updates policy by Rhino, after 10 years, Rhino is half of the price of SketchUp : )) !
Trimble SketchUp is +71% more expansive (license + updates on 5 years) than LastSoftware SketchUp who invent SketchUp
Trimble SketchUp is +136% !! more expansive (license + updates on 5 years) than Google SketchUp.
Google and LastSoftware had developed more SketchUp than Trimble.
Trimble updates are just a shame.
Of course I will banish SketchUp after almost 20 years as an enthusiast user of SketchUp. I am responsible of a lot of license sold, and I trained a lot of people and company during 11 years.
I have found a solution to SwitchUp from CashUp.
I thoroughly believe that companies like Trimble turn to subscription based pricing when they can no longer create innovative products. The software becomes mature enough that new features are few and far between and customers start to realize that its not worth the maintenance cost to stay current. Companies like Trimble have turned to subscription based pricing instead of just creating superior products that customer WANT to buy. I saw this with Quickbooks years ago. I noticed that none of the features they were advertising were worth anything to me so I stopped upgrading. Then they started doing things like features in old products not work so you were forced to do thing by hand or subscribe. It’s a sales tactic much more like extortion than anything else. Companies are spending way too much time trying to figure out how to get money for nothing.
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I agree with you. It is also a vicious circle, since subscription traps users and makes development of improvement very secondary.
We don’t have enough perspective on this system, but I think it is doomed to fail.
To no longer innovate in art, architecture, science, industry, software…, is to condemn oneself.
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Anyone see the irony about telling magazines who basically invented the subscription model that another product is going to subscription? 
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They don’t propose forced subscription model.
I’d argue that these are two very different models.
Magazine subscription is a purchase model. If you stop paying, you keep what you’ve paid for.
Software subscription is a rental model. If you stop paying, you lose access.
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Almost as bad as comparing renting software to owning a car or a power tool. 
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Neither does Trimble or another software company. Nobody is making you sign up. If you bought a perpetual license you get to keep what you bought.
I’d make a different argument: A book is akin to a perpetual license. You pay once, you own the physical book. Magazines are constantly churning out new content, hence why they either need to be ad funded or subscribed to so it’s a viable model. When you stop paying for Fine Woodworking you do get to keep the old magazine, but you don’t get any fresh content.
While many might not notice or see it, the web version of SketchUp is continuously updated. That level of engineering dictates a subscription model.
As many have rightfully pointed out, the web version isn’t as capable as the desktop version. I get that very much.
If you love and use SketchUp and want it to be better, complaining about a pricing model isn’t going to help, at all. Go start using the web version. If it doesn’t work, post about it. If it bugs out, post about it. If you want it to do X Y or Z, post about it.
THIS is how SketchUp is going to get better, not by complaining about a pricing model.
If you can find it, go back and use version 2 or 3 of SketchUp. It has some good ideas, but it wasn’t that great compared to what we have today. The web version is FAR ahead of where 2 and 3 were. Does it have a lot more to go, YES.
For those of you thinking: I want the desktop version updated to, I believe that will happen. Switching from a yearly release cycle to a monthly/weekly release cycle is a big task. There are hundreds of engineers, translators, and product managers that would need to shift how they do things. We’re already seeing the beginnings of that with some of these maintenance releases. This is much easier to do from the start on a newer product like the web version.
So, instead of complaining, direct some of this energy into bug fixes and feature requests!
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ericschimel,
Your post is inappropriate, you don’t have to tell me what I should or should not do.
In addition, your examples are not very interesting. I’m not going to waste my time explaining the obvious to you.
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@ericschimel did not tell you what to do. He is directly responding to your previous post. No different from you responding to his.
You should document yourself better before giving those affirmations. The blender foundation hires lots of developers, do you think they work for free??
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If you don’t need it anymore, you stop paying. You can always access your own data and even edit it in the web version. There, you can also download it in the classic version that you still own.
The term ‘ownership’ is evolving, young generations don’t have the same associations as old(er?) people. What if you could buy ‘light’ instead of a bulb or TL?
If you make the manufacturer and energy company responsible (I don’t care how you do it, I will pay this amount per year to have a certain amount of lux, they wouldn’t make shitty lightbulbs, because they would have to replace them each year. They would make lightbulbs that last forever (like the classic lightbulbs 