Does it pay to be a solution partner with Solidworks?

SOLIDWORKS
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What are the benefits of becoming a solution partner with solidworks?

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The main one is you can sell your product to customers

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You don’t have to be a partner to sell your add-ins.

You can become a Research Associate when you have zero users, which gets you a few SW licenses and which gives you a bit of time to get paying customers. Once you can show two references from paying customers, you can become a Solution partner and at five, you can become a Gold Partner.

But don’t get your hopes up, becoming a Gold Partner has about 100 pages of requirements, mostly regarding the UI. You also need personnel to become one, you need two certified users within your company.

I have two products with the Solution Partner status and I’ve put becoming a gold partner off for somewhere in the far future.

There are no monetary benefits to any level, but you get a page on their site and you can show off the partner product badge. That lets people trust you more, hopefully. As a gold partner, you also get reseller contacts.

3 Likes
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What I find annoying is there’s no way to learn the Development for API’s without being a Var? You can’t even take a course to learn it. how did you get over that hurdle?

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Solidworks API is very powerful but hard to learn. Whereas Inventor’s API is structured logically based on an object model. However, there are courses for solidworks API but they are paid ones.
[API Fundamentals | Training Courses | SOLIDWORKS](https://from solidworks)
[Course Introduction](https://from cadsharp)
Javeline has some courses but
To my knowledge Cadsharp was the first to publish courses on the API.

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Weird when I was talking to Dassault they basically said the training for API especially PDM’s API are basically only available to VARS, but maybe she meant if I want to get a cert?

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You need to have a partner status to sell your product. Check the paragraph 3 in SOLIDWORKS EULA:

You may not use the Offering or the Documentation to develop application(s) for distribution to third parties unless you are a member in good standing of the SOLIDWORKS Partner Program or have entered into an agreement with DS for such usage/distribution.

But you indeed can sell your product being Research Associate partner as well. However this status is only temp status and acts as a bridge to get Solution Partner. Otherwise Research Associate will be cancelled after 2 years and you will no longer be able to sell your product without breaching an EULA.

1 Like
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Yeah, it’s hard. The API docs are pretty complete, although they forgot to explain what all the concepts mean. But I find that, when you really want to build something, you find a way.

I am currently writing a series of about 5 blog posts explaining the basics of the object model. Follow me on LinkedIn or sign up to the newsletter to get notified.

Hey, we have an object model too :wink:

Thanks, I did not know that :stuck_out_tongue:

I lost my status after two years but reapplied and got it again. Building Drew and getting paying customers took a lot longer than anticipated, until it suddenly took off :slight_smile: