Construction software that runs on your own hardware. I hold none of your data. Why I build it this way →
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Why it works this way

The vendor is not permanent. Your drawings are.

A contractor will own half a million dollars of equipment outright and then rent the software that holds the record of what it built. This page is the argument against that, with the receipts.

Three things that have already happened

None of these are hypothetical. You can check all three in about a minute.

  • The vendor gets acquired and the product disappears. Type structionsite.com into your browser. It redirects to dronedeploy.com. The product was bought and the site is gone.
  • The one-time purchase stops being offered. Bluebeam stopped selling perpetual licences on 30 September 2023. Today every plan on their pricing page is per user, per year.
  • The self-hosted option gets retired. Bluebeam's Studio Prime reached End of Life on 31 December 2025. Studio Enterprise, the on-premise server, is in permanent limited support with 3.2 as the final release, alongside a stated commitment to build cloud-based solutions instead.

What I did about it

Four decisions, and each one costs me something.

  • You pay once. $250 a seat for the Office server, free for one person. Updates are a separate optional $100 a seat a year. If you stop paying, everything keeps working on the version you have. That is worse for my revenue and it is the point.
  • It runs on your hardware. There is no cloud of mine to shut off, because there is no cloud of mine. I never receive your drawings, markups, takeoff or tool chests.
  • Everything is a format you already have. Markups are ordinary PDF annotations. Takeoff exports to Excel, CSV and JSON. Tool chests are JSON you can open in Notepad. Every one of those is a promise that survives me.
  • The source is published. Both the app and the server, under the Elastic License 2.0. If I get hit by a truck you can build it yourself. What the licence allows.

The test I use

For any piece of software a shop depends on, ask one question: if this company were gone on Monday, what happens to the work?

For most construction software the honest answer is that the record of what you built is behind a login you no longer have. For this, the answer is that the files are already on your server in formats other programs read, the licence file is checked offline, and the source is on GitHub.

That is not a feature list. It is the whole reason it exists.

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