Welcome to the forum. Solidworks is an awesome program. Use it at work. It is expensive. I believe our licenses are $16K/year.....yes a year. Not sure if that includes their simulation software or not. I learned on Solidworks, and going from that to something like Autodesk (free version) has been a struggle for me personally. Think its the terms/layout throwing me off....possibly some procrastination as well

There are a lot of free design software suites out there that seem powerful; Openscad, Autodesk to name 2. I am sure others on this forum can/will list more. Check out the sites, play around with the programs, dig into their forums for features, and if they don't work for you, you won't have invested a lot of money in trying something out.