How Much Does AutoCAD Cost? Every Way to Get It, Priced

Short answer: AutoCAD is subscription only — new perpetual licences ended in 2016. The full program lists at roughly two thousand US dollars a year; AutoCAD LT, the 2D edition, at about a quarter of that. Students and teachers get it free (education plan), Flex tokens bill per day for occasional use, and there's a 30-day trial. Or step outside Autodesk: CADCraft is free and open source with AutoCAD's commands and DWG support, and some alternatives sell licences you keep.

List prices move and vary by region — treat the numbers here as magnitudes and check Autodesk's site for today's figure. The structure around them changes much more slowly, and that's what this page is about.

cadcraft.org is an independent guide, not affiliated with Autodesk. CADCraft is the ArtCraft team's open-source, AutoCAD-style CAD program (getartcraft.com/apps/cadcraft).

Subscription only, since 2016

Autodesk stopped selling new perpetual licences for AutoCAD in 2016. Since then the only way to run it is a subscription — monthly, yearly or multi-year — which includes every update released while it's active. Cancel and the software stops opening drawings; your files stay yours (DWG is just a file), but the editor stops.

That change is why the alternatives market woke up, and why questions like is there a portable AutoCAD mostly lead to cracked downloads — not a route to recommend.

What the full subscription includes

The headline price buys more than the desktop program:

• All the specialized toolsets. One AutoCAD subscription includes Architecture, Electrical, MEP, Map 3D, Mechanical, Plant 3D, Raster Design — the toolsets that used to be separate products. For an office that needs two of them, this quietly halves the bill.
• AutoCAD Web and the mobile app. Full editing in a browser and on a phone or tablet — genuinely useful for site visits and quick markups, not just a viewer.
• Updates, continuously, plus cloud storage and the Autodesk account machinery.

AutoCAD LT: the 2D edition

For pure 2D drafting, LT is the same program with the 3D modelling removed — and at roughly a quarter of the price, it's the value pick of the official lineup:

The catch is one-directional: if your work later needs 3D or a toolset, you upgrade to the full subscription; there's no discount for having had LT.

The cheaper official doors

• Education plan — free. Students and teachers get the full AutoCAD free, renewable yearly, with an education watermark on plots. If you're learning, this plus a study roadmap is the whole toolkit.
• Flex — pay per day. Autodesk's token system: buy tokens in packs, spend one per day you actually open the program. Below roughly a week of use per month, Flex costs less than a subscription. Above that, subscribe.
• 30-day trial. Full program, free, once. Good for a project evaluation, not a lifestyle.

Outside Autodesk

The full comparison, including what each costs you in workflow differences, is free AutoCAD alternatives and Autodesk alternatives across products.

Which one fits you

• An employer or client is paying: full AutoCAD. It's the industry default, the toolsets are included, and compatibility questions disappear.
• You're a student or teacher: the education plan. Free, renewable, the real program.
• 2D drafting on your own budget: LT — or genuinely free software. CADCraft copies the AutoCAD command workflow and reads and writes DWG and DXF; try it in the browser before installing anything.
• A few days a month: Flex tokens. Do the arithmetic against the subscription once a year.
• You mostly need to exchange DWG files: any editor that reads and writes DWG honestly — which is a shorter list than marketing pages suggest.

The other cost: your time

Subscription money isn't the whole bill — retraining is. Moving to any alternative costs days of "where is that command", against months of subscription fees. It cuts both ways: AutoCAD skills transfer almost entirely to BricsCAD and CADCraft (same commands, aliases and prompts), and barely at all to a genuinely different paradigm. The cheapest long-term position is competence in the AutoCAD workflow itself — which free tools let you build without paying anyone. See how to learn AutoCAD.

FAQ

Related

• Free AutoCAD alternatives: what each free tool costs you
• Autodesk alternatives: the whole product family, mapped
• Portable AutoCAD: why free portable downloads are a trap, and what to run instead