Free SketchUp isn't free for commercial use

by Roopinder Tara, Tenlinks.com

 

(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. SketchUp, known and loved by millions, was revised late last year. There was the usual list of improvements, a name change, but most significantly, it is not free for commercial use.

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:

SketchUp Make is the new name for our basic version. It’s available today and still free to use. With this change, we’re also clarifying that SketchUp Make is not licensed for commercial work.

This means all architects using SketchUp may be in violation of the license agreement. It is easy to overlook. Trimble, who has owned SketchUp for two years, only said this in a May 22 press release:

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.

Free use of the the current release of SketchUp  is confined to students, hobbyists... makers, for which the product is named -- so long as they don't actually ever sell their creations.

Oh, and the price of Pro now goes up from $500 to $590.

Biggest CAD User Base

SketchUp has grown to become, almost by accident and under all radar, the most-used CAD software in the world. It is, by CAD standards, ridiculously easy to use. Being free helped. Trimble says it has 38 million users. 

Created 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 was quite a feat for an upstart and showed no respect for the established order.

Professionals criticized SketchUp for its imprecision and impurity. 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.

SketchUp filled a vital need and so grew to the have the biggest CAD user base in the world.

Trimble Needs to Make Money

Google acquired @Last, the original creators of SketchUp, to populate Google Earth with man-made objects, like buildings and towns. Google cared little about making money from a CAD product and gave it away. Google may have received a little money from users who paid $500 for SketchUp Pro, a drop in Google's big bucket.

When they found people actually cared less about creating buildings and structures than they hoped, the company seemed to lose interest, selling it to Trimble, a company known on a lesser scale than Google (both in revenue and project size). 

But for Trimble, SketchUp is an opportunity to cash in on the now ubiquitous user base.

Let's Not Make a Big Deal of It

The removal of free commercial use from SketchUp achieved barely a ripple. Trimble itself is hardly promoting the change. Even the "official" SketchUp forums have little protest. The few bloggers who posted about the change received a handful of comments. See About SketchUp 2013 and the Meaning of "Free" by Stefan Boeykens on CAD, BIM and 3D.

So while Trimble is not breaking down doors with BSA Enforcers brandishing EULAs as is the way of big software, I wonder how long this will last. Trimble may be content with an honor system only for now.

"They'll get quite a bit of money from firms that have to stay on the up and up," explains an exhibitor at the recent AIA convention, who hopes to capitalize upon stranded SketchUp users.

Enjoy it While You Can

Only one architect I spoke to (out of of over 20 polled for this article) say his firm will be upgrading to SketchUp Pro.

Several others were careful to say they will use SketchUp only in early, conceptual modeling and not for customer deliverables. Is that legal? It's hard to say. One part of the license of SketchUp Make says if you are not selling, renting, leasing or lending the output of SketchUp, it's OK, but then quickly insists you have to get a SketchUp Pro license if you work for a for-profit organization of any kind.

For the other architects and mechanical users who continue to to use SketchUp for business, the future is bleak. Trimble is letting everyone stay on a less-than-latest version, if they have it. This appears to the path of least resistance for most SketchUp users, though over time they will find themselves increasingly isolated as SketchUp moves forward with more updates.

Trimble will not be fixing or enhancing anything but the most recent version. Soon sources of downloads for free-for-commercial versions will dry up -- if they haven't already. Those users may soon not be able to read files made with a current version. A future OS upgrade may render their free version totally unusable.

 [Reprinted by permission of CAD Insider.]

 

Comments

[twitter.com/seandburke]

I hate the be the bearer of bad news... SketchUp (at least as long as Google had control of it) has never been free for commercial use. You had to buy the Pro version to produce commercial work. The disclaimer might have been slightly buried in a larger terms agreement, but it was there and IT departments in large firms have been struggling with designers breaking the terms frequently.

Pro means what it means. Which is why several years ago they disabled some of the export features in the non-Pro version. All that has happened is a name change, and he Pro version is a little more expensive, although still reasonably in the reach of anyone who wants to call themselves a 'Pro'.

[Dean]

In response to the comment above, yes you always needed a Pro version for commercial use, but you were able to use the "free" version when the pro license was unavailable. This was the case up through the early builds of SketchUp 8, and then the software was modified to no longer allow this fallback to the free version. It essentially meant that a company would need to buy a copy of Pro for anyone that wanted to use it simultaneously. And since the networked licenses are sold in a minimum batch of 10, a small company really had to buy individual licenses for all their users if they had 9 or fewer that ever needed to use the software.

[POSH GmbH]

actually Google SketchUp Free can still be used for commercial work:

http://forums.sketchup.com/t/google-sketchup-8-still-free-for-commercial-use/5544

everything with 'Make' in name is non-commercial only.

[Catherine]

I LIKE my Sketchup version 8.... I am a hobbyist who like to make stuff and I don't have the brains to use these complicated programs or the newer versions of Sketchup.... What happens to people like me?

[catherine]

I guess there is no answer for me....great.... :(

[Matt]

Some are saying that Google's free version of SketchUp (Version 8) is not for commercial use. Can anyone here elaborate?

I've read the user license. It says:

"Google gives you a personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to use the object code of the Google Software. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the Services as provided by Google, in the manner permitted by these Terms and Conditions."

The rest of the license simply deals with the privacy policy, automatic updates, rectrictions on export and reverse engineering, etc.

The installation package for Google SketchUp 8.0.4811 is available on FileHippo.
http://filehippo.com/download_sketchup/9114/

[pissedatTrimble]

Answering Catherine, maybe, I started on 5, kept it while using 7, because 5 could import ACAD, 7 couldn't, Then got 8 which was sufficient for a while. 2014 was great until Trimble decided to slash it's FAN base.to make profit which I predict will dry up and blow away for its disloyalty. I mastered all the functions of SKP and Vray some time ago, and agree that it's better than 3ds Max because it accomplishes the same thing for a skilled modeler and the smoothing of SKP is better than 3ds Max, simpler , cheaper MO BETTA. Trimble could maybe survive its treachery if it drops the price of its Pro version. That would position it to knock out 3DS ...IF Trimble gets their heads out of their asses; apologizes to the 30 million followers they cast off. They could come out on top. A lot of us created a SHARING CONCEPT that Trimble doesn't give a rat's ass about.

Anyway as for my rant ...., Catherine I use SKP to access terrains with high detail and GPS Locations with accurate scaling. I have the modeling aspects and the rendering down. If your use is to make objects smaller than a room or files less than 30 Mb then the old 8.0 is probably all you need. Wish I could do that. But I've moved onto cityscapes and 300 Mb files. and I'm going to have to bite the bullet but believe me I'm going to let Trimble know right where they can stick a rusty thimble.

[Md.Deloar Hossain]

Sketch up for personal works.

[Stretch]

I used Sketchup/ Sketchup Make for many years as a hobbyist and intended to try to sell my skills in semi retirement with a Pro license. However Trimble (IMHO) have lost the plot. They've made a commercial but short sighted decision alienating a huge pool of people who might have transitioned to the Pro version. There's just too big a jump between the very limited, slow, internet speed shackled "Free " version and Pro. What they've removed is accessibility.

In typical American style (I mean that kindly, Americans live in a different world...) they imagine that fast internet access is universal so the online "Free" version will be fine. But then they believe they lead the world while still using imperial measurements... Don't get me wrong, I spent a lot of time in the states. I totally get why they love it so much. It's easy to get insulated from the rest of the world when you could spend a lifetime exploring your own country. I'm writing this in rural England btw on a stuttery 3mb/s connection.

So just in case anyone reads this in 2019, could I suggest you take a look at Blender 2.8 currently in late but very stable downloadable beta - see blender builds. The blender interface used to be like the dash of the starship enterprise but 2.8 has made it way more approachable.

Blender *IS* free for commercial or any other type of use. It has much better and more accurate snapping and positioning than Sketchup. The free addons make hard surface modelling (3D CAD to you and I) wonderful. Add a couple of paid addons (were talking 30 pounds/ dollars) and it flies. The lighting/ material/ texture options for visualisation blow Sketchup out of the water.
Yes it takes longer to learn than Sketchup but stick with it, check out the thousands of free tutorials on Youtube and the endless support community, Be happy.

If there is a downside to Blender (from a hard surface modelers point of view) is that it is so powerful, so configurable that its very tempting to get into it's other features - sculpting, animation. Hours disappear.

There are many great free things in life - add Blender to the list.