[StreakyCobra]

I totally resonate with your reaction. I wrote a response to their email out of hopelessness. Pretty sure it won't be read, but as it summarizes my thoughts I can post it here as well:

> Hi Shannon,

> I thought for some years that Autodesk was a smart company.

> Most people I know in the makers community were using Fusion 360 because it was free, and when you are a hobbyist this makes a big difference, you are not gonna to spend hundreds of dollars for simple side projects. Your previous approach of allowing people to use Fusion 360 for free unless they made money out of their project was really smart. These people were anyway not going to be your clients so you (almost) did not "lose" money, and on the other side they got used to your product so when moving to a professional environment they would push for Fusion 360. It was kind of a win-win approach, with the additional effect that Autodesk looked like a hobbyist-friendly company.

> Today you did not just break the main use-case for hobbyists by disabling the export in DXF, but you also showed that you prefer to spend money to block existing features of your software instead of improving it with new paid features. That's an indicator that you don't care about the product itself anymore, but that you are just trying to extract the maximum money out of your current users instead.

> I don't see the point to support a company like that anymore, so I deleted my account. It is now useless anyway.

> You did not only lose a user, you lost my trust. And probably not only mine.

[imglorp]

Yep and it's also short sighted, eating their future user stream.

Hobby users often show up later in the workplace, where they'll naturally lean toward tools they're familiar with there's an option.

Hobby users also tend to form communities, where they share what they build and learned, more free advertising and more new users.

Plenty of companies would die for a curated new user stream like this.