It is more of that data. Most people can't afford an architect and almost everyone who buys a templated plan from one of those sites ends up changing it for another $5k-$15k with a drafter (lower cost) or architect (higher cost).
For a lot of people, they like a house, but they want to fit it to their needs and don't know how.
We are hoping to bridge the gap through lowering the cost to ideate and iterate on home designs.
We have people in almost every country use the product, but we need to add metric system for it to be more relevant. There are likely much different codes as well and this has been trained on US houses. It can still function as an ideation tool, but will need more make the exports more usable.
In 2-3 days, we are pushing a change to the flow of the product to start on a project and orient more heavily towards designing with a purpose. That page will still exist, but as a place you go for inspiration or a starting point (we have remixing). It'll be nested in a sidebar where pinned inspiration is stored inside of a project and will autofilter based on what you're trying to do with your project to be more relevant.
Try creating a design and let me know how that goes!
Thank you! At some point we will. We are working through the basic generative interactions mechanics and manual editing to allow for people who need to get more nuanced to do so and then will incorporate a chat layer for those that want to stay at a high level (pure intention level).
That's definitely a good use case. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to design a home. We aren't trying to replace an architect. It'll allow people who couldn't do it before to now do it (0->1) and empower people who know what they are doing to do much more (1->100) like vibe coding has done.
Completely agree with this. Most cities in the US are not that strict. Those cities are where building actually happen. Not in LA, Bay Area, etc, etc.
Majority of homes being constructed in the US are done in areas where as long as you follow the general code standards, you'll be able to get approval. This is why template house plan websites exist.
A very standard process for a builder is buy or use a template -> make tweaks with a drafter -> structural engineer for additional structural documents and stamping (liability) -> submit for permitting.
This opens the market for a tool like ours. In the short term, it won't be as helfpul in strict markets, just pure ideation, but over time that'll change with the model learning how to ingest local codes standards for designing within.
You are literally building your own house? that's cool!
I started and ran a tech-enabled pre-construction service for ~6 years and grew up in a homebuilding family.
Codes, structural, MEP, and pricing are definitely huge pieces of the buildability puzzle. These are layers we plan to train into the model. Right now we are focused on the schematic level ideation process. So figuring out the flow and shape that can often a take a while to stabilize in the architectural design process.
Once we have this tooling built out, we will add more layers of context that helps make better buildability and cost decisions.
Super familiar with other BIM software. Chief Architect is a more residentially opinionated one. We are hoping to bridge the gap between these high-skill bar softwares and anyone wanting to design. Their capabilities and data structures are helpful robust usability. Just a bit complicated for most people. We are working on more interopability, so people can continue in whatever workflow while we are focused on the schematic level design phase (currently have DXF, IFC, GLB, and PDF exporting).
There are a lot of people who dream scroll well in advance of buying or building, so we hope this can be a good place for productive exploration. I'm hoping people get inspired enough to want to go build.
We've had people design a house in the software and then recreate it in the sims. We also added .GLB file types because game designers were wanting to put houses in their video games.
Engineering would be awesome! We want to get to training the model on structural constraints. We will start with basic foundation drawing, but will get deeper as we have the bandwidth to do it.
We had a bug with our furnishing generations that is now fixed, we are working on backfilling all of the old renders that had the issue. Hopefully this fixes most of the room rewriting that's happening.
It is more of that data. Most people can't afford an architect and almost everyone who buys a templated plan from one of those sites ends up changing it for another $5k-$15k with a drafter (lower cost) or architect (higher cost).
For a lot of people, they like a house, but they want to fit it to their needs and don't know how.
We are hoping to bridge the gap through lowering the cost to ideate and iterate on home designs.