TinkerCad is closing it’s doors. Currently they are taking no new users, and ramping down service totally.
I feel the is a huge mistake for the community of makers as a whole.
What are your thoughts?
Sad to see it go. Even though their pricing was unrealistic it is the only kid-friendly 3D CAD that I have seen and my kids liked it.
I think this is wonderful. Im sick of seeing terrible objects uploaded to thingiverse with no testing effort at all put in and conspicuously missing the ‘work in progress’ flag. Every time i came across one of these things, it seemed they were ‘uploaded from tinkercad.’ There are other better tools for CAD that don’t make it trivially easy to clutter up thingiverse with useless junk.
I only use Free and Open Source Software I can install on my own machine. I don’t trust the Cloud or any hosted service to stay forever. And in true maker-sense we shouldn’t rely on centralized services but focus on decentralized and distributed solutions. Or else we could all just order our thingiverse objects from shape ways and be done with it 
It would be easy to add a local export/import feature and then all you are left with is web hosting expense, but they didn’t want to bother I guess.
FreeCAD, Blender, Sketchup 8 are all completely free CAD tools that are more powerful, and in some cases just as easy as TinkerCAD; $20/month for a low-power cad program that could be shut down at any time? Screw that.
It will be interesting to see how Airstone will be implemented in forth coming 3D CAD tools. I was an avid user of Tinkercad and had the pleasure of being an early beta tester. After they closed down the communities beta months ago, I felt they might close down. Development seemed to slow down after they released their Shapes API. I’ve since taken an interest to 123D Design from Autodesk. The web app ui/ux is very Tinkercad like and even has more features and tools. Most free cad tools aren’t as intuitive or optimized for 3D Printing, 123D seems to be one of the better alternatives in my option.
FreeCAD, Blender, Sketchup 8 are all completely unusable by children. Try to sit a 7 year old in front of FreeCAD and see what happens. My kids were making houses in TinkerCAD after 2 minutes. TinkerCAD was a toy, but it was a damn good toy.
Gotta agree after getting a little more familiar with 123D that it’s actually quite a good and pretty complete tool. Could even be somewhat usable by kids. We’re trying to put together a 3d modelling and printing course for kids and 123D and Sketchup are the top contenders for the software of choice.