GrabCAD Workbench will go offline on June 1, 2023, after ten years in the industry.

The much-loved tool was introduced in 2012, giving students and engineers a platform to share and collaborate on CAD models. The tool has been nearing “nearing end-of-life for quite some time”, said Danny Boyd, Customer Support Manager at GrabCAD.

The decision has come amidst a lack of staff on the development team, stretching resources to the point that GrabCAD decided to pull the plug.

Boyd continues: “For a long time, about five years I think, Workbench has had no dedicated developers, only my team for customer support […] it became increasingly clear that Workbench didn’t fit in our vision for GrabCAD products in the long term.”

He added: “Even the minimal changes we had to do as part of this announcement — adding notification banners and other small website changes — took development resources away from other high priority projects for GrabCAD Print and the platform.”

Out of the 20,000 active Workbench users, Boyd said there were just a dozen responses to the announcement shared on the GrabCAD blog in August. Some users said they would “gladly pay to keep the product alive”.

Boyd said he can understand their “pain”. “It’s bittersweet to see it go” when, as a free-to-use tool “for what Workbench offered, the price was unbeatable.”

GrabCAD is most popular with students: one reason the team decided to keep the tool operational up until the end of the school year. Although some community members suggested they could sell Workbench or make it open source, Boyd said:

“This too is impossible since the databases for users, accounts, projects, etc. are all shared with the Community, and there’s no way to separate them.”

GrabCAD is now putting its efforts into growing the GrabCAD Platform, the community (where you can download CAD files), and 3D printing software.