I’m a furniture maker (like, for money). I’ve been using it for largely 2-D jig making for a few years and it’s been great in conjunction with a ShopBot for precise templates.

I updated to the 1.1 release candidates, and it’s been great. I do a lot of design for people who are remote, and being able to model things with more complex curves has been a game changer. Sketchup is adequate at the free level and not good enough to convince me to upgrade to paid.

The Assembly workbench has let me use FreeCAD much more closely to how I think about putting a piece together, and the sketcher-based workflow is a godsend for curved work.

1.1 is a huge leap forward. I delivered a table last year that I modeled for the client in FreeCAD. The model was super rough. I’m designing chairs for it now, and for the first time, I feel like my skills are the limit, and not the software.

If you’ve found it clunky before, it still has its rough edges, but it’s legitimately at the point where I think the good parts are good enough for me to overlook the rough edges and move to FreeCAD almost entirely.