TraceBIM/For homeowners

Homeowners and owner-builders

Permit drawings for your own project, drawn by you.

Someone at the counter asked you for drawings. Not a photo, not a sketch on graph paper: a set of pages that shows your house as it is now, what you are changing, and how it goes together, printed at a stated size with measurements on it. TraceBIM is software that draws that set.

Read this before you spend anything. Many US jurisdictions accept plans prepared by the property owner for residential work. The rules are local, and it is your responsibility to confirm them with your building department before you submit.

TraceBIM is a drafting tool. It is not a licensed architect or engineer, it does not check your drawings against the building code, and it cannot approve, stamp, or seal anything. Where your jurisdiction requires a licensed design professional, you need one, and no software changes that.

So make one phone call first. Call the building department for your city or county, say what you are doing and how big it is, and ask two questions: do you accept plans prepared by the property owner for this work, and what do you want to see in the set. If the answer to the first is no, stop here. You have lost nothing.

If the answer is yes, the rest of this page is about the drawings themselves: what they are, why they get sent back, and what you would be doing instead of hiring someone to draw them.

Create your account Open the studio

Free for everyone. No subscription, no credit card.

No drawing experience assumed You mark up the plan. TraceBIM suggests the change.
You approve every change Suggestions arrive as a list. You accept or reject each one.
Property owner is the first option Issue for Permit opens on the owner-builder role.
Free Every feature, for everyone. No credit card.

Start here

What the building department is actually asking for.

The plan-check list you were handed is written for people who draw for a living. Here is the same list in ordinary words.

Site plan
Your lot seen from above. The property lines, the house, the driveway, and where the new work sits. The plan checker uses it to see how close you are building to the edges of your property.
Floor plan
One floor of the house seen from above with the roof taken off. Walls, doors, windows, rooms, and measurements. This is the drawing most people picture when they hear "plans".
Elevation
What one side of the house looks like from the outside, drawn flat and straight on, with no perspective. A house has four of them, and you will usually be asked for the sides you are changing.
Section
What you would see if the house were sliced straight through and you looked at the cut face. It shows ceiling heights, floor thicknesses, and how the roof meets the walls.
Detail
One small spot drawn much larger, so a builder can see exactly how the parts stack up. A window head, a footing, the edge of a new slab.
The project info box drafters call it a title block
The box printed along the edge of every page: the property address, the page number, the scale the page is drawn at, who drew it, and the date. Pages missing it come back.
Door and window lists drafters call them schedules
A table of every door and every window in the project with its size, so nobody has to measure each one off the drawing.
What's there now, what comes out, what's new
A remodel is three drawings of the same house: the walls that exist today, the ones being removed, and the ones being added. Plan checkers ask for all three because they need to see what you are touching.

This is the common shape of a residential permit set. What your jurisdiction requires is a local question, and the department's own list is the one that counts. Ask for it in the same call.

The part nobody warns you about

Drawings get sent back for boring reasons.

Most first-time sets are not rejected over the design. They are rejected over the drawing itself. These are the usual reasons, and what TraceBIM does about each one.

Wall you cut through
Wall behind it

The two line thicknesses TraceBIM draws a wall with. You never set them.

The work

You describe the change. TraceBIM draws it. You check it.

There are three things you do, and none of them require you to have used drawing software before.

Put your house into it

Start a project and draw the outline of what is there today: the outside walls, the interior walls, the doors and windows. You click two points and a wall appears between them. This is the part where a tape measure is genuinely required, because nobody measures your house for you.

Tape measure, an hour or two, straight walls

Mark up what you want changed

Draw on the plan the way you would draw on a printout: a line where the new wall goes, a circle round the window you are replacing, a note in your own words. TraceBIM reads the markup and comes back with a list of proposed changes. It labels each one high, medium, or low confidence and puts the ones it is least sure about at the top.

TraceBIM suggests, you decide

Approve, look at every page, print

You accept or reject each item on the list. Nothing lands in your drawing because the software decided it should. Then you open each page, read it, fill in the info box, and export a PDF. While you are still working, every export carries "DRAFT — NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION" across it.

Your eyes on every page

When your markup is unclear, it asks If you circle something vague, or your note contradicts what is on the page, or you point at a wall that is not there, TraceBIM asks you a question instead of inventing an answer. A guess that looks confident is worse than a question.
It will get things wrong The product's own wording says its output may contain errors, and that is the honest position. You are the one who reads every page before it goes to the counter. If you are not willing to do that, this is not the right tool for you.

The statement you sign before you export

Taking the DRAFT stamp off is a deliberate act.

Ordinary exports are stamped "DRAFT — NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION" over a second line, "Requires licensed design-professional review and stamp". The only way past that stamp is a short form where you say who you are and what you have confirmed. TraceBIM keeps a record of it.

What the dialog says, word for word

You are about to export this drawing set without the “DRAFT — NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION” stamp, for submission to a building department. Many US jurisdictions accept plans prepared by the property owner or contractor for certain residential work — but the rules are local, and it is your responsibility to confirm them before submitting. TraceBIM is a drafting tool, not a licensed architect or engineer.

The first of the three roles you can pick is “I am the property owner preparing plans for my own property (owner-builder)”, and it is the one already selected when the form opens.

Quoted from legal/PERMIT_ATTESTATION.md, the versioned record of the exact wording shown in the product.

Then you tick three boxes, and each one is a real statement:

  • You asked, and they said yes You have confirmed with the building department that it accepts plans prepared by someone in your role, without a licensed design professional's stamp, for this scope of work.
  • The drawings are your responsibility You understand TraceBIM is drafting software, that its output may contain errors, and that you are solely responsible for the accuracy, completeness, and code compliance of the drawings.
  • You read the set You have personally reviewed every page in the set as it will be exported.

You also type the city or county the set is going to and the property address. Then TraceBIM records your account, the date and time, your answers, the page list, a fingerprint of the exported file, and your IP address, and prints an issuance number on every page.

This is a record of what you said, and nothing more. It is not an approval, a stamp, a seal, or any indication that a plan checker will accept the set. TraceBIM prints the pages. Your building department decides what happens to them.

Issue for Permit is included for everyone. Until a set is issued, every export keeps the DRAFT stamp and there is no way around it.

Before you sign up

What TraceBIM does not do.

If one of these is the thing you were hoping for, find out now rather than after you have drawn your house.

It does not check your drawings against the building code

There is no code checking in the product. Setback distances, egress window sizes, ceiling heights, stair rise and run, smoke alarm placement, energy requirements: every one of those is yours to get right, and getting them wrong is the most common reason a set comes back.

It does not approve, stamp, or seal anything

No software can. A stamp comes from a licensed architect or engineer, and approval comes from your building department. TraceBIM produces the drawings you hand to them.

It does not remove a requirement for a professional

Plenty of residential work requires a licensed architect or engineer: structural changes, some additions, some ADUs, whatever your jurisdiction lists. TraceBIM neither changes that requirement nor satisfies it.

It does no engineering

No structural calculations, no beam sizing, no load checks, no heating and cooling design, no energy modelling. If your project needs a beam sized, somebody qualified sizes it.

It is one account, for one person

One email address is one account. There are no extra logins to hand your contractor, no shared projects, and no way for two people to work in the same drawing. You export a PDF and you send the PDF.

It cannot open drawings from other software

There is no import. If someone gave you a CAD file of your house, or an old set of plans as a PDF, you will be redrawing from it rather than loading it in.

Honest expectations

How much work this is.

The quickstart takes a blank project to a printed floor plan in about ten minutes, and it assumes no previous experience. That is the floor, not the ceiling. A permit set for a real addition is a bigger job than a single plan, and it is fair to expect several sittings spread over a few evenings rather than one afternoon.

What you need before you open it

  • Measurements of the part of your house you are changing. Outside wall to outside wall, room by room, plus ceiling heights. Measure twice.
  • Your property address and your lot dimensions, which are usually on the deed or on your county's property record.
  • The building department's list of what it wants in the set, from the phone call at the top of this page.
  • A rough idea of what you want. You do not need it resolved. TraceBIM is better at "move this wall three feet and put a window here" than at deciding whether that is a good idea.

Where it is still rough

Stick to straight walls. The drawing tools handle curved walls, but doors and windows in curved walls still have rough edges, and the column, beam, and slab tools are marked "coming soon" and switched off. If your project depends on those, you will hit the edge of the product.

What you should not expect

You should not expect to skip learning anything. You are doing work that is normally done by someone trained to do it, and TraceBIM removes the drafting, not the thinking. You still decide where the wall goes, you still check every page, and you still own what you submit. What you save is the drawing labour and the wait.

Money

What it costs to have someone else draw it.

These are published figures with their caveats attached. Use them to size the decision, not as a quote for your project.

What you are buying Published figure What the figure actually means
A full set of construction drawings, drawn for you $3,500–$9,000
per project		 Remote AE's published range for an outsourced set. It is vendor marketing prose with a stated range rather than a rate card, and no method is given, so treat it as indicative.
"A full set of architectural drawings" on a freelance marketplace $250–$800 Fiverr's own published average. At the same marketplace's stated 8–15 hours per page, that money buys roughly one to three pages, not a 15–30 page permit set. This is the number that gets quoted at people, and it does not mean what it appears to.
TraceBIM Free Free for everyone: every feature, every project, Issue for Permit included. No subscription, no credit card.

Sources and confidence ratings: docs/competitive/pricing/. The $3,500–$9,000 range and the marketplace average are both rated medium confidence. Neither is a quote for your project, and what a drafter near you charges is a local question like everything else on this page. Check the pricing section for what TraceBIM costs today.

Questions

The ones worth asking first.

Am I allowed to draw my own plans?

Often, for certain residential work on a property you own. Many US jurisdictions have an owner-builder path for exactly this. But the rules are local, they depend on the scope of the work, and some projects require a licensed architect or engineer no matter who owns the house. Confirming what applies to you, with your own building department, before you submit is your responsibility. That is one phone call and it is the first thing to do.

Will my building department accept a set drawn in TraceBIM?

That is a local question and the answer varies by jurisdiction and by scope of work. TraceBIM prints the pages; it does not approve them and cannot promise anything about how they are received. What it gives you is a set drawn the way drawings are supposed to be drawn: measurements taken from the geometry, the printed scale matching the drawn scale, heavier lines where the cut passes through, and a filled-in info box on every page.

Do I need to know CAD, or have drawn anything before?

No. The main way you work is to mark up the drawing and let TraceBIM propose the change, which is closer to drawing on a printout than to learning drafting software. There are manual tools if you want them, and the quickstart walks through the first ten minutes of them. You will still have to learn where things are. Nobody gets a permit set out of software they have never opened.

What if my project turns out to need an engineer?

Then you hire one, and the drawings you have already made are not wasted. A set of accurate existing-condition drawings is the first thing any architect or engineer asks for, and handing them one usually costs less than having them produce it. TraceBIM can also export a file that other design software can open, though what it contains is a subset of your drawing rather than the whole thing.

Can my contractor open my project?

No. One email address is one account, and there is no way to invite somebody, share a project, or give a second person a login. You export a PDF and send them the PDF, which is what most contractors want anyway. If your plan depends on two people editing the same drawing, TraceBIM is not ready for you today.

The plan checker asked for changes. Now what?

You open the project, make the change, look at the pages it affected, and issue the set again. Because every page is a drawing of the same house, moving a wall updates the pages that show that wall rather than leaving you to find each one. Each time you issue for permit you go through the form again and a fresh record is kept.

What does it cost?

Nothing. TraceBIM is free for everyone — every feature, every project, Issue for Permit included, no subscription and no credit card. Until a set is issued for permit, its exports carry the DRAFT stamp.

Is the AI going to draw my house wrong?

Sometimes it will propose the wrong thing, which is why it proposes rather than acts. Every change arrives as a list you accept or reject one item at a time, each item labelled with how confident TraceBIM is, and the least confident ones are at the top of the list so that is where your attention goes. When your markup is ambiguous it asks a question rather than guessing. It does not know the building code and does not claim to.

Start with the room you are changing.

Make the phone call first. If your building department takes owner-prepared plans for your project, open an account, draw the walls you already have, and see what one page looks like before you decide anything else. TraceBIM is free and takes no card.

Create your account Read the ten-minute quickstart

TraceBIM is drafting software, not a licensed architect or engineer. It does not check drawings against the building code and it does not approve, stamp, or seal anything. Permit rules are local, and confirming them with your building department is your responsibility.