[namibj]

Well, one doesn't need to be professional to the extend where one can argue Tekla Structures to be worth the cost, if the goal is to design structures for hobby/DIY work.

Depending on the purpose, structural failure might be sufficiently low-risk to not need more than a cursory glance by an engineer to check whether the concept is sufficiently-sane and the stresses the software calculated are no reason to worry.

People today build these structures without software-assisted structural analysis. Or anything, really, beyond rough numbers.

I hope there'd be something that be good enough to not fly blind when working on hobby projects that would benefit massively from clever structural design. Finding someone qualified to look over the finished design is often reasonable, but paying them to do clerical work (e.g. re-drawing your blueprint in their CAD, just to get the computer to calculate stresses), would be too expensive.

I just see that these tools all have license fees where any non-full-time usage is directly prohibitive.

Even if a good tool has e.g. 500$ + 20% royalties (of the sale price), that'd be far better than what I see out there from my searching.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

I see and understand your point and agree to some extent.

Not real sure what to do there?

I'd maybe consider doing a course at my local Tafe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_and_further_educatio... ) and do a design course and get friendly with the people who work there and run the workshop part of the campus so they might let you continue to use the facilities are you've finished.

Not sure if you have anything like that around your parts.