What student needs unlimited Connect storage ?) So this is also not the confusing Pro named subscription (the one for 299/yr that has a bunch of stuff students will never use in a year. (But, these are yearly licenses, not “classic”, and expire 1 year from date that the school buys them.) The school can decide to (and most likely would) include the cost into the course tuition for students and eat the cost for the teacher. These are not subscription as the school buys the pool by the number of students and teachers they’ll install from the pool. The $55/yr subscription price is for the Studio license for Students, which gives access to all professional level editions of the entire SketchUp family of products.įor the full desktop SketchUp/LayOut product, the student cost is at most $39 per year (10 seat min.,) and could be as low as $19.50 per year if the college pays for 1000 or more laptop pool licenses. $55.00 per year for the “FULL” version of SketchUp is still a pretty good deal in my opinion. That’s never happened before but it signaled to me that I should do the same and that it is, sadly, time to say goodbye to an old friend. Last year, none of the roughly 50 or so students in my design classes used SketchUp on their own for class projects after the required assignments. I see it in class where students get quickly frustrated and disinterested in SketchUp when 6 or 7 years ago they were excited and delighted. You’ve made “Free” so annoying and difficult to use you won’t get new adopters and will depend more and more on aging Pro users from the good ‘ol days. The names keep changing, this one’s online, this one allows plug-ins, that one doesn’t. All the marketing changes are really hurting you. Students are slammed with higher tuition, cost of living and debt than ever before and $55 may seem like a trivial amount to you and I and the marketing department but to my students it’s a week’s worth of food.

But students will not pay $55 for a one-year license of a pretty basic and frankly declining software when AutoCAD, Vectorworks, the entire Autodesk suite, not to mention Blender, Twinmotion, Unreal and many other industry standard packages all offer free student licenses. You’ve never really been academic-friendly with Pro but the original default SketchUp did enough to get my students started. I think you’ve made some poor business choices that will really harm your product. But this is the first year in over a decade that I will be dropping SketchUp from my curriculum. I also tech a variety of CAD and modeling software to my advanced students but I’ve always appreciated SketchUp’s simple interface and workflow that allowed beginning students to jump in and start thinking in 3D after an hour or two. I’ve been using and teaching SketchUp to generations of my college students since the Google days. I sent this message to the SketchUp Customer Service yesterday and they asked me to post it here:

Vectorworks student licence