This article covers the reasons for making the decision to offer a Gravity Sketch free product back in 2021. It’s quite long but we wanted to be open and thorough for you all. Since then, we have continued to iterate and make changes on our free offering. If you have any questions about this transition or want up-to-date specifics on the Free product, please get in touch through the website or on our social platforms.
 
We are on a mission to help creatives work more effectively and expressively with digital media; improving communication and through doing this help define new creative workflows. leveraging digital 3D design in your creative pipeline shouldn’t require months of training. A few years ago the emerging VR ecosystem gave us the confidence to dive headfirst into developing Gravity Sketch as a VR first creation tool. We were met by a dedicated community of early adopters who supported us throughout the first few years of our journey; with great feedback and through the purchase of the tool which helped us grow a team. We are so proud and grateful to see the growth of this amazing community. We have hit a milestone that we’ve been working towards for almost three years. We’re excited to announce that we’re gearing up to make the community even bigger by providing our core creative toolset for free to all individuals.
What are we doing?
On January 25th 2021, we are making Gravity Sketch free to all individual users on all platforms. This also means the software will soon be moving out of Early Access on Steam and Oculus Rift stores. Don’t worry, we are far from done with the development of the tool, however we feel the software is at a place where we can consider the current version a production ready tool for several workflows.
Why are we doing it?
Over the past few years the tool has been adopted by a healthy number of users who have helped influence the direction of the development as well as our business model. To truly achieve our mission of accessible digital 3D creation, making the core creative product free is the best way forward. Through this move, we hope to achieve two separate, but connected goals:
- Democratise digital 3D design by lifting any barriers for creatives to get involved.
- Better understand and support more creative workflows.
Why now?
Early Adopters were instrumental to what we have built to date; many of whom brought Gravity Sketch into their formal workflow which resulted in enterprise contracts that helped accelerate our revenues to the point at which we can support and grow the team and platform.
What is the difference between the free and paid versions?
- Free: As we grow, we continue to pay close attention to how we can best support the design community with a free product that will empower creativity with an easy set of tools to help capture 3D ideas. That isn’t changing: we still want Gravity Sketch to have the tools you need to create — geometry, ink, stroke, surfacing, textures, layers — all for free. By default, users will now be placed onto a Free plan, which will be subject to feature limitations.
- Paid: With the community continuously growing, we are seeing how Gravity Sketch can influence enterprise companies’ workflows. Paid offerings support the different use cases and business sizes of companies using Gravity Sketch to bring products to market. Paid plans benefit from:
- Unlimited collab rooms and the ability to share with your team, in real-time or async
- Access to Screen Collab, Gravity Sketch’s desktop app, to collaborate from a screen
- Unlimited 3D file downloads from LandingPad
- Tailored support and training from Gravity Sketch’s design consulting team
What’s going on with LandingPad?
LandingPad will grow into a much more powerful part of the design workflow. The platform already allows us to deploy and manage the software across multiple devices as well as allow you to manage files across any device you use Gravity Sketch with. The decision to put more focus on the platform and smoother workflow has been driven through user feedback and feature requests, giving us conviction to building out this part of our ecosystem.
We want to make LandingPad more valuable to the overall workflow and Gravity Sketch experience. Seamless file management was the first step but there is a lot more to come. We are bringing features to LandingPad that are bespoke to the digital 3D design workflow, for example:
- Web inspector, which provides the ability to inspect and view sketches and 3D files in the browser removing the need to download the full file if you’re only after a peek.
- File tagging and commenting: share notes and comments on a file that you are working on outside of the VR experience.
- Sharing and managing files: keep your files organized and share project files with your collaborators.
These features are almost critical to mobile device users (e.g. Quest), where plugging in your device to extract files is a waste of time and breaks the creative flow.
What does this mean for new users?
From January 25th 2021, anyone will be able to download Gravity Sketch for free on all app stores. To enable the full experience you will need to sign up to a LandingPad account in order for us to deploy the features for your end-to-end workflow.
How can you stay close to the development of Gravity Sketch?
The community is the key to everything we have built today, without the support and feedback we would not be where we are now. As they say ‘nothing is free’, we need feedback. We are banking on growing the user base and in turn gaining more insight into your workflow and how we can improve the tool for wider professional adoption; ask more from us as we continue to develop the platform. Without this we can’t keep going and growing, so show your support through using the tool and letting us know pain points, and help your colleagues and the rest of the community get up to speed working with Gravity Sketch.
Plug into the community on Discord, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can contribute to the discussion, share your inspirational work, as well as keep your eyes out for competitions and opportunities to be featured on our workflow page and blog.
We have a pretty close knit beta slack group which we work closely with to prove out alpha features that are coming to the platform or fun ideas that may never come, we will be expanding this a little over the year so if you are interested in being really active with feedback (engaging with the product team daily or weekly) please apply to be a part of our beta here.
