TraceBIM/For architects
For licensed architects at 1–10 person firmsYou design with a red pen. Someone then has to turn those redlines into thirty coordinated sheets. Today that someone is an offshore drafting pod, a drafter you have to keep busy, or you, on a Sunday. TraceBIM is the fourth option.
You mark up the drawing. TraceBIM reads the markup, proposes the model changes as a list, and you approve them one by one. The sheets redraw from the model: line weights, dimensions, schedules, title block. You stay the author of the set.
Free for everyone. No credit card. Runs in a browser tab, iPad included.
Permit rules are local. Whether a building department accepts a given set is a local question, and confirming it is your responsibility.
The line item
The competitor is not a seat of Revit. It is the drafting invoice, or your own unbilled weekend. Here is what that line costs today, with the source for each figure and the caveat that came with it.
| What you buy today | Price | What the number means |
|---|---|---|
| A full CD set, outsourced offshore | $3,500–$9,000 per project | Remote AE's published range, varying with size, scope and detail. Six projects a year is $21,000–$54,000 on this line. |
| Redline drafting, per sheet | $68 → $28 | A US studio's cost per sheet before and after moving its redlines to an offshore pod. Self-reported vendor case study, so it is indicative, not audited. |
| A drafter or BIM tech in-house | ~$82/hr break-even | ~$98/hr billed. Derived from BLS salary data ÷ 2,080 hours × Deltek Clarity's 162% overhead and 3.15× net multiplier. |
| "A full set of drawings" on a marketplace | $250–$800 | At the marketplace's own stated 8–15 hours per sheet, that money buys roughly one to three sheets of offshore labor, not a 15–30 sheet permit set. |
| TraceBIM | Free | Free for everyone, every feature included. No subscription. |
One month of TraceBIM costs less than one day of a drafter. That is the whole pricing argument, and the numbers above are where it comes from.
Sources: docs/competitive/pricing/part01-summary.md, which holds 91 sourced
figures with confidence ratings. TraceBIM itself is free for everyone; the
other figures are the market's, so check them before you budget against them.
Redlines in
No new modeling vocabulary, no family editor, no weekend spent learning a ribbon. You mark the drawing the way you mark a print.
Clouds, arrows, a dimension you want changed, a note in your own shorthand. TraceBIM runs in a browser tab, so the iPad and Pencil you already mark up on are the input device. Nothing to install, nothing to sync.
You get a list of proposed actions, each labelled high, medium or low confidence and sorted so your attention goes where TraceBIM is least sure. When a markup is ambiguous, contradicts itself, or points at something that is not there, it asks a focused question instead of inventing an answer.
You apply or reject each action. Nothing enters the drawing because TraceBIM decided it should. Every element it touched keeps a provenance record you can open from the properties panel and trace back to the markup that produced it.
You stay the author. TraceBIM proposes; you approve. It is drafting software, not a licensed design professional, and it holds no authority over the set. Where a jurisdiction requires a stamp and seal, it still requires one, and that authority is yours.
Annotations that hold
The failure you are guarding against is the annotation that comes loose: the wall moves, the dimension keeps its old number or points at nothing, and you find it on the printed sheet during plan check. That failure is a data-model problem, and TraceBIM's data model is built to make it impossible.
Each dimension holds references to the things it measures, such as a wall face, a jamb center or an endpoint, and computes the distance and the line geometry at evaluation time. There is no typed length to go stale.
Move the wall and the dimension re-values and re-draws inside the same transaction that moved it. The drawing and the model cannot disagree about a length, because only one of them stores it.
The binding runs both directions. Edit the displayed value and the engine holds the pinned reference, computes the delta, and translates the free element. The number you wrote becomes the geometry, and everything downstream of that wall updates with it.
Every change goes through the same loop: snapshot, mutate, propagate, commit or roll back. A change that would leave the model inconsistent rolls back whole rather than landing half-applied.
Plans, sections, elevations, schedules and dimension strings are all evaluated from that one model, so a coordination error between two sheets is not a thing you have to go looking for.
Output craft
These are the details a reviewer notices in the first ten seconds, and the reason most generated drawings do not survive contact with a plan checker.
Every element type carries two weights: one for what the cutting plane passes through, one for what is visible beyond it. A wall in plan prints its cut face at 2.0 against 0.5 for what sits below the cut, and each element can be overridden from the properties panel against the standard weight catalogue.
Lengths print as US architectural feet-inches, rounded to the nearest 1/8" and
reduced to lowest terms: 22'-7 1/2", never 22'-7 4/8".
The formatter rounds the total number of eighths first and then divides into
feet and inches, so a length that rounds up to twelve inches carries into the
next foot. You will not find a 4'-12" on a sheet.
Views are set from the standard US list — 12"=1'-0" down to 1/32"=1'-0", plus the civil range from 1"=10'-0" to 1"=100'-0". The scale printed in the view label is the scale the geometry is drawn at.
Dash periods and hatch density scale with the view, so a 1/8" plan does not print the dash pattern of a 1/4" plan.
Annotation is not a layer of loose text sitting on top of geometry. Each of these is an element in the same graph, evaluated with everything else:
Handoff
Your structural engineer, your energy consultant and your client's contractor all want a different file. These are the three that ship, described with their limits attached.
Work-in-progress exports carry a DRAFT — NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION stamp over a second line, Requires licensed design-professional review and stamp, stamp. Issue for Permit replaces that stamp with an issuance record. You select your role (property owner, licensed contractor, or licensed design professional), confirm three statements, and name the jurisdiction and the property address.
TraceBIM then records your account, the time, your answers, the sheet list, a fingerprint of the exported file and your IP address, and prints an issuance number on every sheet. It is a record of what you asserted, kept so the exact sentences you agreed to on a given day can be reproduced later.
It is not approval, a stamp, or a seal. Permit rules are local. Whether a building department accepts a given set for a given scope of work is a local question, and confirming it is your responsibility. TraceBIM is drafting software, and its output may contain errors — you are responsible for the accuracy, completeness and code compliance of the drawings you issue.
Limits
You are going to find these out in week one. Better to find them out now, before you put a live project through it.
IFC, DWG and DXF are export formats here. You cannot bring an existing DWG base sheet, a consultant's IFC, or a legacy CAD drawing into a TraceBIM project. New projects start in TraceBIM.
The Revit output is a one-way package export. There is no plugin, no live link, and no way to push a change back from Revit into the TraceBIM model.
TraceBIM does not check your drawings against a building code, and nothing in it enforces a code citation. The citation corpus ships empty. Code judgment is yours, exactly as it is today.
No MEP coordination, no structural analysis, no load calculations, no energy modelling. Your consultants still do their work; TraceBIM hands them a file.
One email address is one organization, permanently. There is no way to add an employee, hand a project to a colleague, or give a consultant access inside TraceBIM. Today it is a single-principal tool, and a two-person firm should know that before buying.
Every capability on this page is in the shipped product and was checked against the code on September 19, 2026. The set, its exports and an honest findings report are on the proof page.
Questions
No. The input is a redline on a drawing. TraceBIM builds and maintains the parametric model behind it, and the manual drawing tools are hidden until you turn Manual mode on. If you want them, they are there, and the quickstart guide walks through drawing a room by hand in about ten minutes.
Not today. There is no DWG, DXF or IFC import. A project starts in TraceBIM, which makes it a better fit for a new project than for finishing one that is already half-drafted elsewhere.
An IFC4 file, and each sheet as a vector PDF (the whole-set export rasterises at 150 dpi). The IFC carries 15 of the 50 element types, so it is a geometry and coordination handoff rather than an analysis model: no quantities, no structural profiles, no MEP subtree. It was validated with IfcOpenShell 0.8.5, which read 445 entities and built 12 of 12 solids. If your engineer works in Revit, the exchange package is the other option.
No, and it does not claim to. TraceBIM does not check drawings against a code, cite a code section, or flag a violation. The corpus that would back that ships empty and the citation enforcement is off. Code judgment stays with you.
You are. Every AI-proposed change arrives as a list you apply or reject, each item labelled with how confident TraceBIM is, and each element it touched keeps a provenance record back to the markup that produced it. Nothing lands in the set without your approval, and nothing about the software substitutes for your license or your seal.
Not yet. One email is one organization, and there are no seats, no invitations and no shared projects. If your workflow depends on a second person opening the same project, TraceBIM is not ready for you today.
That is a local question and the answer varies by jurisdiction and scope of work. TraceBIM prints the sheets; it does not approve them. When you issue for permit, you attest to the jurisdiction, your role and your review, and TraceBIM records it. Confirming what your building department accepts before you submit is your responsibility.
Nothing. TraceBIM is free for everyone — every feature, every project, no subscription and no credit card.
Start with a small addition or a remodel you would otherwise have sent out. Redline it, approve the changes, and look at the sheets. If the line weights and the dimensions are not what you would have drawn, you will know inside an afternoon.
TraceBIM is free and takes no card. It is drafting software, not a licensed design professional. Permit rules are local, and confirming them with your building department is your responsibility.
TraceBIM