There is big news from the Autodesk Developer Network team: there’s a new membership tier in town, and it’s free!
ADN Open is designed for people who are interested in developing with Autodesk software, but can’t justify the expense of $1,000+ dollars per year in membership fees.
Over the last year or more, we’ve been investing significant resources to put in place the infrastructure to support this free tier of ADN:
- Publishing a significant portion of our DevNotes – which were previously only available to ADN members – via our public DevBlogs.
- The only exceptions will be deprecated or confidential material (we won’t be posting beta information via our DevBlogs, for instance).
- Increased presence on the API discussion groups
- We’re working on integrating our back-end infrastructure with the API discussion groups – so that we know when standard & professional ADN members have posted questions to the forums that we should answer. We’re also making sure we spend more time in the forums to help address questions coming in from ADN Open members, too.
- Making sure all our training material, DevTVs, etc. are publicly accessible via our Developer Centers
- Including “My First Plug-In” material for novice programmers.
Which all adds up to the fact that many people for whom ADN was too expensive can now get the help they need to develop applications for Autodesk software.
There are still situations where companies will choose to pay for either standard or professional ADN membership, though:
- Access to software – whether beta or released – for development purposes
- 1-on-1 support from Autodesk
- Pre-release information about Autodesk products, including an invitation to our annual DevDays tour
- The ability to publish company and product information on Autodesk’s Partner Products & Services website
And of course ADN Standard and Professional members will also benefit greatly from being able to use standard search engines (such as Google) to research issues without logging in to the ADN extranet.
Here’s a comparison of the various membership tiers, to help you determine which is right for you:
|
|
Open |
Standard |
Professional |
| Discussion group support | ● | ● | ● |
| Access to public KB content | ● | ● | ● |
| Access to NDA KB content | ● | ● | |
| 1-on-1 support response time | 3 business days | 1 business day | |
| Software for development use | ● | ● | |
| Company info on partner products | ● | ● | |
| Cost | Free | 1,400-3,800 $/€ | 2,300-5,600 $/€ |
If you’d like to understand more about the rationale behind this change, I recommend reading this blog post by Stephen Preston.
