STARTING ON 2022-03-29: “FLEX” TOKENS WILL BE THE ONLY WAY TO PAY FOR AUTODESK CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICES
2022-02-24
Autodesk have introduced a new, token-based payment system called Autodesk Flex last September, where users can purchase tokens that can be used universally to pay for Autodesk products and services. That system has been covered here in a previous blog post.
This payment system will start to be widely used on the 29th of March as the exclusive way to pay for Forge cloud computing hours. Not familiar with Forge? You can check these two AU classes:
Combining Forge And Machine Learning To Automate Time-Consuming Tasks - 2020
Beyond Dynamo: The Powerful Automation Potential Of Forge And The Revit API - 2021
In fact, some of Forge’s APIs, including but not limited to the Design Automation API (which can run an automation routine over a remote cloud server, ex: running a Revit add-in over a remote cloud server to export PDF from a BIM 360 model, without downloading nor locally opening that model in Revit), and the model derivative API, used to have a dedicated cloud credit system, mainly because such services are usually priced on an hourly basis to follow the pricing model of the web service they are hosted on (in this case Amazon’s AWS).
As an example, processing a Revit model “in the cloud” used to require 6 cloud credits per processing hour.
One cloud credit used to be priced at 1 USD and a minimum of 100 cloud credits was required to be purchased per year for each Forge account.
Starting on the 29th of March, Cloud Credits will no longer be available for purchase and will be replaced by Autodesk Flex tokens, which will be the only way to pay for such services.
1 Autodesk Token is at 3 USDs and a minimum of 100 tokens will still be the minimum yearly requirement for a Forge account to be compatible with hourly priced APIs, which means that the equivalent in USDs will be 300 USDs/Year instead of 100.
In theory, this should not affect users that currently consume more than 300 USDs worth of cloud credits per year, as the hourly rates in USDs will almost be the same when the new payment system will take effect…
…However, the current minimum amount of Flex tokens that can be purchased is 500 tokens, which have an expiry date of one year. Therefore, if no other use for those tokens is needed at a company and less than 1500 USDs worth of Forge cloud credits are currently required at that same company, the amount required for an annual subscription, and for the exact same annual cloud processing requirement, will go up from what it may currently be (ex: 100 USDs/Year) to a minimum of 1500 USDs/Year…
Is this the beginning of a new, token-based pricing era for all Autodesk products and services? We shall know in the near future…
For more information about this new pricing model, you can check out the original announcement article.
2022-04-01: UPDATE:
Our friend Adam Sheather pointed out that a pack of 100 tokens will still be available for purchase. After the change of pricing happened, we were able to verify that on the Forge pricing page (although the Flex page still shows a minimum of 500). Here’s a screenshot:
Therefore, the 100 to 1500 increase part of the article is not accurate, and only an increase of 200 USDs will be affecting the minimum cloud credit requirement. Thus, and as the hourly rate in USDs wasn’t affected, users that used to consume a minimum of 300 USDs worth of cloud credits per year will not be affected by this change of pricing.
Thank you Adam!
