Solidworks/keyshot for freelancers group license

Hi All,

Does anyone do shared solidworks or keyshot licenses for us freelancers? Curious to see if people are interested in doing a group deal or if its even possible?

Thanks

This is against the software terms of agreement, and often not possible given licensing software which locks access to a single node/user.

Ok good to know, I know they have large multistation licensees available and thought might be a way to pool resources.

There are networked licenses available, but if you read the terms of service it’s always licensed to a company.

I haven’t read the EULA (End User License Agreements) for each package specifically, but we use floating software and it’s all tied to the company and has to be served from a networked server to the clients.

Now if you wanted to start a " company " who’s only asset is a license server and a bunch of contractors you could but it becomes very messy very quickly.

-You’re in charge of collecting money from people in your pool to pay for the software.
-Once someone pulls out a license, no one else will be able to use it. This might be manageable if you have 10 licenses, but very quickly people will realize they won’t be able to use the software when someone else is, so they’ll never close their copy of Keyshot therefore never surrendering the license. So now you have to buy more seats to fill the demand and by the time you do that you’re going to have to charge each user almost as much as a real seat.

The cloud licensing model makes software more accessible, but sometimes the only thing you can do is get the software and hope you have enough business to keep yourself running. Software at least comes with decent tax deductions in the US.

i did this when i had my own firm and offsight resources. i had floating lic. with the software installed on laptops in various locations. note you have 1 lic. only one person can run SW at a time.

Makes sense, good point about it becoming messy quick

thanks

Autodesk now rents software by the month. I can’t help but think SolidWorks, Keyshot, others will move in that direction at some point.

Cool thanks for sharing Dan. Would love that idea to happen