Have you been keen to test out a few of the many tools available under the Autodesk umbrella but don't want to fork out for something you might not use often? Perhaps you have a specific project running for a short time or a teammate that only needs to use a tool for a minimal number of days per month?
Flex tokens might be the answer.
What are flex tokens
While not as fun as the arcade variety, Flex tokens are as the name suggests; flexible. You can use them on any of the Autodesk tools, at any time, for as little or as long as you need, by any teammate at any volume.
They are a digital 'token' that you can spend to gain access to a certain tool for 24hrs.
How do I set them up?
It's pretty much the same as a typical product.
Just assign the product 'Flex' to a user once purchased and away they go!
Only difference is, you can select products that you want to grant the user access to, or simply leave it as 'select all' for them to use any tools at their discretion.
How do I buy them or top up if I run out?
Reach out to your overly-friendly sales representative. They will help you to process the purchase, just like any other product you may have with us. You can of course buy direct with Autodesk via your portal too. It costs exactly the same, but we won't have any visibility on your purchase and doing so can limit our effectiveness should you run into any issues. Up to you of course.
What can I expect to spend?
Each token has a set daily amount. Below are a few popular tools and their costs per day:
- Revit - 10 tokens / day
- Navisworks - 9 tokens / day
- Inventor - 8 tokens / day
- AutoCAD - 7 tokens / day
- 3DS Max - 6 tokens / day
- Vault - 3 tokens / day
- Fusion 360 - 2 tokens / day
- ReCap Pro - 1 token / day
But again, this is just a sample, you can find more tools and their token prices here.
Tokens are purchased in packs, starting at 100 tokens, costing about $430 AUD.
Just do the math on what you may need (eg, you can get about 2 weeks of AutoCAD with the 100 token pack).
Monitor your Usage
It's always a good idea to keep track of your token spend via your Usage Reports. If you find you are needing to top up your tokens often, it's worth doing a bit of digging to see if there is a particular piece of software that is high-use. It may work out cheaper to buy a seat than to keep using tokens. It all depends on how you use the software, staff numbers and what your upcoming project might require.
Important: Remember to close your products down after each session. You don't want to get charged for leaving your project open over the weekend. Write yourself a post-it, set a calendar reminder if you have to, but don't get charged unnecessarily.
Some things to keep in mind when using Flex tokens
- Tokens do expire. Make use of the tokens within 1 year from purchase
- If you sign in to your product and use tokens for that day, you have 24 hrs access. Eg: If you use Revit at Lunch on Monday, you have up until Lunch on Tuesday before it runs out.
- If you accidentally open a product and close it again quickly, you won't be charged, provided it was closed within 5mins.
- Any user who has been assigned 'Flex' as a product, can draw down from the pool of tokens
- Users aren't notified of the balance, only when there are insufficient tokens, so make sure you stay topped up to keep your projects flowing.
- You can limit the products a user has access to, but not the amount of tokens they spend. Make sure each Flex user gets the memo about closing down before the weekend.
Now you can go forth and Flex
(No yoga mat required).