CoCreate CAD Give Away

With CoCreate Personal Edition (PE), CoCreate joins the ranks of CAD vendors who give away a version of their CAD product. Over 50,000 copies of PE have been downloaded and registered. However, it is not known how many are in active current use.

The program file is about 90MB (which is small relative to the size of most general purpose CAD programs). To download it, you have to fill out a short questionnaire but it's fairly painless. After the survey, CoCreate shoots you a link via email to activate the product. After initial activation, the program must be reactivated every 72 hours. Geoffrey Hedges, the man behind the program, tells me the reactivation can happen often without the user knowing it. So why keep CoCreate PE users bound to the Internet? I'm still trying to figure that out.

Pluses

• up to 50 part assemblies
• no time limit
• no ads
• full 3D

Minuses

• users must logon on every 72 hours or program stops working.
• does not have advanced surfaces, threaded holes or hole wizard, sheet metal, CAM, FEA or other add-on modules
• data files cannot be read by commercial version. However, if customer upgrades to commercial version, they can upload all PE files and CoCreate will convert them to commercial version.
• no telephone support, no live support of any kind. tutorials are available online and a user forum.

You can download CoCreate Personal Edition for free here.

Comments

[rtara]

I downloaded it with all good intentions of using bu then had to unistall it to get some room back. Problem: it still asks me to connect to the Internet every time I boot and I can't find out how to get rid of that. I'm afraid CoCreate may be haunting me forever.

[Claus Brod]

Minor correction: The part limit is 60, not 50.

[ralphg]

I downloaded the free CoCreate some months ago, didn't install it -- bad habit of mine.

Got several emails from CoCreate noticing I hadn't installed it yet. Found that spooky.

Don't like it when corporations "know" what I'm doing in the privacy of my basement office.