SketchUp Pricing 2026: Go, Pro, Studio, and What It Actually Costs

Trimble states that it offers monthly plans alongside annual ones, but it does not publish the month-to-month rates. If you need a single month, you have to start checkout to see the price.

SketchUp Go — $129/yr

Web and iPad only. You get cloud storage, the premade content library, and the mobile viewers, but no desktop application and no LayOut. Go is a viewer-and-light-edits tier. For an architect producing documentation it is not a working seat.

SketchUp Pro — $399/yr

The standard professional seat: desktop modeling, LayOut for documentation, PreDesign climate insights, access to the 1,000+ extension ecosystem, and the wider file-format compatibility that makes SketchUp usable alongside Revit and AutoCAD. This is the tier most firms actually buy.

SketchUp Studio — $859/yr

Everything in Pro, plus three additions: bundled V-Ray rendering, Scan Essentials for point cloud modeling, and the Revit importer. The rendering component is Windows only, which is the single most expensive footnote on the whole price list — see below.

Trimble also sells three narrower Pro variants that rarely appear in pricing summaries. They matter if you need one Studio capability but not the rendering bundle.

Pro Scan at $499/yr is the cheaper route to point cloud modeling if you would otherwise buy Studio at $859/yr purely for Scan Essentials.

The student rate is $55/yr against $399/yr commercial — roughly 86% off. Education licences are for coursework, not commercial project work.

Not in any lasting way. Trimble offers a 7-day free trial of its full toolset, and SketchUp for Schools is free for K–12 students and teachers with a Google Workspace for Education or Microsoft Education account.

The free consumer web version that people usually mean by "SketchUp Free" is no longer promoted: the current plans page lists no free tier, and the old sketchup.com/products/sketchup-free URL no longer resolves. Treat any guide still describing a permanent free web tier as out of date.

No. Every plan Trimble currently sells is a subscription, and its own pricing FAQ describes all offerings as annual or monthly subscriptions — there is no one-time purchase option anywhere on the list. The honest way to read these prices is as a recurring annual cost for as long as you need the software. Older perpetual "classic" licences still run, but they are no longer sold and do not get new versions.

The subscription is the floor, not the budget. Three line items sit outside it, and the first one is where SketchUp budgets usually break.

Rendering software

SketchUp produces styled viewport output. It does not produce photorealistic renders on its own, so you need something else. These are the current list prices, taken from each vendor's own pricing page:

Trimble prices its own answer to this as a plan upgrade rather than a line item. Subtract Pro from Studio and you get what the bundled rendering actually costs:

Two things make that $460 worse than it looks. First, it bundles rendering with point cloud modeling, so you pay for Scan Essentials whether or not you scan anything. Second, the bundled V-Ray rendering in Studio is Windows only — a Mac-based studio can pay the full $859/yr and still not have the renderer it upgraded for. If you want to see what the output looks like before committing, our architectural rendering examples walk through what each kind of input produces.

Plugins and extensions

The extension ecosystem is a real reason to buy SketchUp, and a real cost. The heavily used ones are paid and licensed per seat, and they renew annually alongside everything else. Budget somewhere between $100 and $500 per seat per year depending on how much of the modeling work is repetitive.

Training and hardware

SketchUp itself is quick to learn. The render engine on top of it usually is not — V-Ray in particular has a steep enough curve that studios budget formal training for it. Hardware is the other quiet cost: real-time engines want a discrete GPU, which is exactly the spend an AI renderer that runs in the browser avoids.

Putting those together, here is what a year actually costs at three common setups. Licence figures are Trimble and Chaos list prices; the extension and training numbers are estimates and are marked as such.

The jump from the first row to the second is almost entirely rendering. One freelancer who outsources visuals runs at about $500 a year; the same person adding a render engine and a couple of colleagues is at seven times that before buying a single machine.

For modeling and documentation, Pro at $399/yr is hard to argue with — the extension ecosystem alone justifies it, and nothing at that price models as fast.

The weaker part of the deal is visualization. If the only reason you are looking at Studio is client-facing imagery, you are paying $460/yr for a Windows-only renderer with a real learning curve, on top of a licence you already have.

You can keep Pro and render the exported view instead. Render a House takes an exported SketchUp view, or an OBJ or GLB file, and returns a photorealistic image without a render engine or a GPU. You can start free — 3 renders a day — and paid plans are $39/mo, or $312/yr, roughly a third less than the $460/yr Studio upgrade, and it runs on macOS. Full plan details are in the pricing docs, and SketchUp to render walks through the export step. If you just need to open a file, the SketchUp file viewer is free, and if you are weighing AI renderers against each other, MyArchitectAI vs Render a House compares the two most common ones.