Economical CAD software recommendations  

Plenty of free ones ... what is your work style, what sort of parts are you creating?

Cheerio,

RE: Economical CAD software recommendations

Fusion 360 can be free if you only use it as personal use.

RE: Economical CAD software recommendations

On the long term I would recommend FreeCAD, as it will be freeware as long as they develope and support this peace of software.

Best regards, Clemens

RE:

Fusion 360 hobbyist license

TinkerCad

FreeCad

SketchUp

OnShape

and oodles more. The "best" depends on your requirements and modeling style.

If you like a more programming-style design process, OpenSCAD.

For a more artistic style of modeling, ZBrush Core Mini is actually surprisingly good.

RE:

Fusion 360 is great from what I hear but it is high risk. Autodesk is increasingly crunching down on the free version and you might learn a program which could effectively move entirely behind a hefty paywall.

Freecad is open source, can do a lot and it is not too much tutorial work to get into it. It is however certainly unpolished in some ways and has its bugs. 

I would also like to mention Plasticity. It is not parametric but the "cheapest" way to get your hands on the very powerful professional Parasolid engine. Compared to other programs in the field it is also relatively slim and easy to use (but not as easy as for example TinkerCad). You can do precise designs but the approach is very different from parametric programs. Its a one time payment of 100 USD or so. No subscription no yearly fees. The good thing is that it has a 30 days demo for free. One can simply try it out to see if it fits the own requirements. 

Blender is a great tool for boolean operations, if nothing else. It can manage perfectly fine where Freecad or Meshmixer fail and it is completely free. There are ambitions to expand its parametric capabilities but that is still rather in the infancy from what I have heard. Blender as such is certainly primarely a 3D animator program. 

RE:

I'll second the FreeCAD recommendation.  I've been using it for a number of years and it keeps improving.  I've encountered some bugs but there is a very responsive help forum.  I've been using it mostly for small parts (1mm x 10mm) to (100mm x 200mm) for bio-engineering r&d support and fixing broken stuff around the house/farm.  I use it on FreeBSD mostly but sometimes on Linux also.

RE: Economical CAD software recommendations

Solid Edge community edition.  This works for me for my 3d Printing in retirement after 40 Years in CAD/CAM.  Free for hobbyists and personal use.   Quality is great.  Many video based tutoriala and help sections.   Outputs .stl, .stp and more. Imports .stp, parasolid, CATv4/5, Pro Engineer and many more.   It can convert a dumb solid into a dimension driven one.    I tried a few of the "free" ones and they cost me plenty in time and were not close to the capability I was accustomed to. 

See Software Rules 10, 14, 16, 45, 54, 76