We are shutting down Ondsel
After operating for almost two years, Ondsel has made the difficult decision to cease operations and close down. We are incredibly thankful for the support we’ve received from the FreeCAD community and the larger engineering CAD communities.
From the beginning, we knew competing with commercial CAD would be tough. Closed-source CAD is taught in schools and is deeply entrenched in established industry use. We knew that to be successful, we would have to find a way to provide real value and coexist in environments where other tools are already used.
While seeking a scalable and repeatable business model, we conducted numerous surveys and interviewed nearly a hundred mechanical engineers, service engineers, tinkerers, inventors, workshop owners, and other users. While we found support among independent and hobbyist users who genuinely wanted us to succeed, we failed to find commercial adoption to justify a venture-capitalized startup. Ultimately, we could not find a product-market fit and ran out of runway to continue the search.
Between our May release (2024.2) and today alone, 145 pull requests by the Ondsel team have been merged into the upstream codebase, making FreeCAD 1.0 a more featureful and polished release than we all hoped it would be.
