One geometry kernel, one small team, one very long project.

Why build this at all

Professional CAD works. It is also expensive, heavy, tied to subscriptions and ecosystems you don’t control, and largely indifferent to the platforms a lot of people actually design on. Makers, students and small teams end up choosing between tools that are genuinely capable and tools they can genuinely afford and enjoy using.

Zenve3D is an attempt to refuse that trade. The modeling concepts are the ones experienced CAD users already know — sketches, constraints, dimensions, features, a full parametric history. What changes is everything around them: a native application, a modern geometry engine, and pricing that a person can justify on their own.

Built in public, including the parts that fail

Most of the hard work in CAD is invisible from the outside — the constraint solver, the kernel, rebuilding a model feature by feature, picking the right edge under a fingertip. The YouTube series documents that work as it happens: architecture decisions, difficult bugs, experiments that went nowhere, and the milestones that made it worth continuing.

No roadmap theatre and no invented deadlines. What’s shipped is shipped, what’s missing is named as missing.

What the project holds itself to

• Professional — Capable of designing real-world mechanical products.
• Accessible — Approachable for makers, students and small teams.
• Transparent — Progress, decisions and limitations shared openly.
• Community-driven — User feedback directly shapes the roadmap.
• Fairly priced — Professional CAD without enterprise-level spending.

Where it is today

Zenve3D is in open beta on macOS and iPad through TestFlight, free while the beta runs. A web version is planned. The beta is where the project gets most of its direction — the founding community decides which rough edges get filed down first.