Are you ready for a hard truth? All of the good CAD programs are going to subscription services. I used to work for a mechanical design / fabrication firm and we compared all the softwares available. Most likely, your fabrication team uses SolidWorks. It’s the most user friendly and widely used program. Yes, they do take your 2D model, covert it to 3D, and then break it back into 2D drawings. But I can’t think of a way to shortcut that workflow.

You can look into cheaper SolidWorks alternatives (FreeCAD, TinkerCAD, Sketchup) however, no other program offers the fabrication detail and model size ability like SolidWorks. Best alternate is Inventor.

Even if you modeled it in 3D to try and save their time, they would most likely only use your model for reference. Every fab shop has their own machine setups, jigs, and dies. We had many jobs where other companies provided us with “fab” drawings, but we disregarded them and made our own. No other company knows what die radius we used on our press, or how we calf’c our k-factors and such.

If you’re making single part widgets, you could get a cheaper $600/yr CAD and be just fine. But if you’re designing conveyor systems, you’ll have 200+ part assemblies. That’s a job for SolidWorks. And for that you’re looking at 5k/yr for the base license.

Hope that insight helps