NativeCAD

Three things, each with its proof

Install — four ways in, one release

Everything below is served from this site's own release directory and named, with sizes and checksums, in releases/latest.json — currently v0.27.0 (2026-10-28). Node.js 18 or newer for the npm routes; the Claude Desktop bundle needs nothing else.

npx -y https://featureboard.ai/nativecad/releases/nativecad-mcp-0.27.0.tgz

npm install https://featureboard.ai/nativecad/releases/nativecad-kernel-0.3.2.tgz

Free keys report failures. A free key, from /register or a non-commercial key, always sends a report when NativeCAD fails. It sends what broke, the version, your key id, the kinds of input (never the values), and a small test case that a computer builds from simple shapes. It never sends your models, files, names or typed text, and a bug report you write by hand has its file paths, file names, part, body and parameter names, engraved text and matching coordinates removed first. After a failure, NativeCAD uses some of your computer's processor in the background to build the test case. Free keys have no off switch. Paid keys can turn failure reporting off with their licence. Turning it off also stops the background work. Exactly what is sent.

A quote, in twenty lines

A customer uploads a STEP file. You answer with the geometry facts a price depends on. Millimetres and radians throughout — there is no unit argument anywhere in the API.

const cad = require('@nativecad/kernel');
cad.setLicenseKey(process.env.NATIVECAD_KEY);   // a key is required — see pricing

// Parse + tessellate in one call. `parser` is the live B-rep, not a mesh dump.
const res = cad.solveStepFile('uploads/bracket.step', { targetCount: 20000 });

// What it is.
const props = cad.MassProperties.compute(res.mesh);   // volume, centroid, inertia
const stats = cad.GeometryStats.getStats(res.parser); // the read a quoting front-end needs

// What it costs you to make it.
const DENSITY_AL_6061 = 2.70e-6;                      // kg/mm^3
const massKg = props.volume * DENSITY_AL_6061;

// Whether you should quote it at all.
const { parser, solidId } = cad.ops.primitives.box(20, 20, 10);
const dfm = cad.ops.dfmRules.checkRules(parser, solidId, { process: 'machining' });
// dfm.approved / dfm.blockedBy / dfm.findings — each violation attributed to a face

The same kernel meshes to constrained-Delaunay tets and writes Nastran, Abaqus or VTK decks, and the ~135 KB gzipped viewer renders the result client-side with no server round-trip.

Stacked against the alternatives

Competitor figures read from their public pricing pages on 27 August 2026.

When the geometry has to live inside your product and your customers' data has to stay inside your network, this is the kernel built for that job.

Run the numbers — flat wins

Per-second CAD looks cheap until your product works. At Zoo's posted $0.0083 per second, against our published prices, and assuming a geometry call takes about eight seconds:

Past roughly 250 geometry operations a month, a $200 seat has already beaten per-second CAD — and it stays flat at 25,000 and at 2,500,000. A quoting bot serving forty RFQs a working day crosses that line in its first week. The costs a price list never shows land on the same side: a network round-trip per operation is fatal to an interactive configurator, and someone else's uptime becomes your core feature's uptime.

Two prices. Use it, or ship it.

Design with NativeCAD on a flat $200 seat. Put it inside the product you sell with one flat SDK licence — no developer count. Same kernel everywhere: no feature gates, no call quota, no meter.

The questions you are about to ask

Competitor figures are quoted from public vendor pages as of the date above the table, and we correct them the day a vendor tells us one has changed. Zoo, Autodesk (APS), CAD Exchanger, OCCT, OpenCascade.js and CadQuery are named to identify each row's offering; they are their owners' marks and NativeCAD is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Site-wide notices are on one page: legal notes.