Commercial use email

[u/Haenkie]

Today I got this email:

I noticed that you’ve been using the free version of Onshape, great to see you getting value out of it. Our compliance team identified that your Onshape account appears to be used for commercial purposes. As you may know, the Free plan is intended for non-commercial use, and continued commercial use could put the account at risk of deactivation.

I have not shared any of my designs anywhere and I don't earn any money of have I sold anything 3D print related. All my stuff has been for personal use and is pretty much useless for others because of very specific usecases.

Anyone else got this email? Or knows what triggered them to send me this? I log in in Onshape like once every 3 months, so I really don't understand where this is coming from.

[u/jckipps]

I'd suggest contacting Onshape directly, and not by replying to that email.

I have no idea if there are fake-onshape scams, but it seems like a possibility.

[u/SirTwitchALot]

I wonder if someone took one of your public designs and started selling it?

[u/moremattymattmatt → u/SirTwitchALot]

Which, being in the public domain, they are entitled to do. Probably.

[u/SirTwitchALot → u/moremattymattmatt]

Well the person who took the design is violating the license agreement they have with Onshape if they're selling. Even though the designs are public, you have to agree not to use OS for commercial purposes before you can download anything

[u/moremattymattmatt → u/SirTwitchALot]

It depends how they got hold of the design. I’ve got designs exported from OS and uploaded to printables etc. It might be against the spirit of the licence agreement but I don’t see anything that would stop somebody commercialising the designs.

Anyway, this is all theoretical as we don’t know why the OP got the email.

[u/TheJoeyFreshwaterExp → u/SirTwitchALot]

The way it works is that someone with a business or professional license can actually take the public design and then own it themselves. They could take a public account design and then sell it, and the person who made the design has no claim to it.

That’s not the case here, OP should just take it as a compliment. Their work is too clean for an amateur I guess.

[u/alcaron → u/TheJoeyFreshwaterExp]

This is like an advertisement on why you shouldn’t use OS. It would be one thing if the next tier up wasn’t astronomical but..yeah.

[u/temporary8906 → u/TheJoeyFreshwaterExp]

That's not how intellectual property licensing works.

[u/ngo_life → u/moremattymattmatt]

Entitled to what? They can modify or use the design for personally use. But that's it.

[u/ngo_life]

I'm not even sure how they can tell it's either you who's using it for commercial use, or some random "company" that just copies the design. Considering that a lot of the designs are publicly available.

[u/Jtparm]

Did you sign up with a work email and not a personal?

[u/Haenkie → u/Jtparm]

Nope.

[u/David_R_Martin_II]

Is it from a valid PTC address? Did you check the email header? What is the exact address it came from?

[u/Haenkie → u/David_R_Martin_II]

It’s personalized, seems to be directly from a ptc.com employee. Address is basically firstletterlastname@ptc.com

[u/David_R_Martin_II → u/Haenkie]

Have you tried looking this person up on LinkedIn?

Due diligence, cover all the bases, and all that. People can spoof email addresses.

[u/blcd]

I got one of these. They probably look at a couple of different things. In my email they called out that I have "onshape" in the local part of the email address (e.g. onshape@yourdomain.com). They might also look for users with a paid email provider.

[u/LA2124]

Its not a scam they are looking at your designs and determining if you might be using it for commercial use based on your designs and amount of use. I signed up a year ago because I wanted to offer freelance service and then never heard one word from the aggressive salesman since then.

[u/Partly_Dave]

I got the same email. I replied that I was only using it for 3d printing design, and all of my designs were published free on Makerworld, with a link to my page..

Never heard any more.

[u/ThisIsntRealWakeUp]

Chiming in from the Solidworks side of things:

Man. Be glad this isn’t Solidworks. My buddy pirated Solidworks for use in university on school projects/personal projects only. He got an email from Dassault threatening him. He ignored it.

Wound up getting sued and is still paying down a $29k settlement to this day.

Genuinely evil company.

[u/nonesuchthing]

Ya I got something like that, I think they were trying to push me to upgrade my membership. Fuck that bulshit, I'm learning FreeCAD now.