Autodesk for Small Business Debuts

Autodesk is launching Autodesk for Small Business. 

“More people than ever are designing, building, and running their own businesses. ... We’ve heard directly from our customers that they need more flexibility, more clarity, and technology that reflects how they actually work. Autodesk for Small Business is about building around their needs and building alongside them as they bring the world around us to life,” says Dara Treseder, chief marketing officer, Autodesk. 

To start, Autodesk for Small Business is focused on three areas:

Experience

Autodesk’s new Small Business Hub is a destination on Autodesk.com where small businesses can explore products, compare options, and find tools without navigating an experience designed for large enterprises, according to Autodesk. The hub also provides a direct line for users to share feedback. It’s live nowin the United States and United Kingdom, with more countries to follow later this year.

The company is also prioritizing product improvements shaped by small business feedback: 

• Design and Make: Autodesk Assistant in Fusion turns natural language into action across design and manufacturing workflows. It enables text-to-command modeling and automates workflows for transitions, while being contextually aware of the task at hand. 
• M&E: Autodesk Flow Studio has introduced flexible pricing tiers, including a freemium entry point, that scale with the needs of business so smaller studios and independent creators can experiment with the latest VFX and animation technology, without upfront costs. With the newest feature releases of Wonder 3D (a generative text to 3D model), AI Rigging, and Neural Layer, Flow Studio enables teams to streamline modeling, rigging, and animation. 

Flexibility

Autodesk Flex allows customers to prepay for token-based access to more than 100 Autodesk products, with no subscription and no long-term commitment.

Special offers

In May, Autodesk will introduce special offers; the company is also offering a free Autodesk Professional Certification exam voucher with the purchase of AutoCAD.

Recent Report

To understand how small businesses are shaping the future of Design and Make industries, Autodesk partnered with GlobalData on a new State of Small Business report.* 

Top findings include:

• Design and Make professionals are leaving corporate to start their own businesses: Nearly 1 in 5 Design and Make professionals (18%) say they’re considering starting their own business in 2026—six percentage points higher than the broader small business economy.
• Nearly 60% of small business owners in Design and Make say the latest technology is too complex or not designed for smaller teams—seven points higher than the broader small business economy.  
• Independent work is becoming the norm in Design and Make: More than one third of the Design and Make workforce (36%) now operates as freelancers or contractors, outpacing the broader workforce (32%) by more than three percentage points.

*Methodology

Autodesk’s State of Small Business report was developed in partnership with third-party analytics firm GlobalData. The analysis draws on GlobalData’s U.S. business and employment tracking data to evaluate growth trends in small businesses and freelance work over the past 3 years. 

Visit the hub. Check out the video. Download the report.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.