The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Strategic decision · 2022–2024
Ondsel's FreeCAD collaboration bet: ~100 interviews, no PMF, shut down Nov 2024
Ondsel bet pros would pay for cloud collaboration on FreeCAD; after ~2 years, ~100 interviews, no PMF, it shut down and open-sourced Lens.
Ondsel
What the business is
Ondsel built Ondsel Lens, cloud workspaces for FreeCAD teams — shared projects, versioning and publishing — and funded core FreeCAD development (Assembly, Sketcher, variables/variant parts) to make the open-source CAD suite accessible enough to compete with commercial tools.
How it started
Brad Collette (Sliptonic), a long-time FreeCAD core contributor, founded Ondsel with a team of FreeCAD developers to give commercial CAD users a more accessible FreeCAD experience — a cloud collaboration layer with polished UX — after years of seeing the project's usability and team-workflow gaps.
What happened
Over almost two years Ondsel developed Ondsel Lens and pushed major features into FreeCAD, including the Assembly workbench and variables/variant parts that became headline features of FreeCAD 1.0. Collette's team surveyed and interviewed nearly a hundred engineers, machinists, repair technicians, inventors and workshop owners looking for a scalable, reproducible business model, but found support mainly among independent users and hobbyists.
How it ended up
In November 2024 Ondsel announced it was shutting down after almost two years, saying it had not found product-market fit or a business model that justified venture capital, and had exhausted the options to continue. The Lens codebase was later transferred to the FreeCAD organization and released under free licenses, while Ondsel developers continued FreeCAD work funded by FreeCAD Project Association grants.
Background
Ondsel was a commercial company built around FreeCAD, the open-source CAD suite. Its core team was led by Brad Collette (Sliptonic), a long-time FreeCAD maintainer, and its product, Ondsel Lens, added the cloud layer professional teams lacked — shared workspaces, versioning and publishing — while Ondsel engineers contributed core features such as the Assembly workbench, Sketcher work and variables/variant parts to FreeCAD itself.
The bet was that CAD professionals frustrated with closed tools like SolidWorks and Fusion 360 would pay for an accessible, collaborative experience on open-source FreeCAD. After almost two years, Collette's team had conducted surveys and interviewed nearly a hundred engineers, machinists, repair technicians, inventors and workshop owners. They found genuine support among independent users and hobbyists, but no repeatable commercial model that could justify a venture-backed startup.
In November 2024 Ondsel announced it was shutting down, saying the team had been unable to find product-market fit and had exhausted the options to keep searching. The announcement was widely discussed — the Hacker News thread drew 317 points and 184 comments, and Hackaday covered what it meant for the commercial prospects of open-source CAD.
Rather than disappearing, Ondsel's work was handed to the community: the Lens code moved to the FreeCAD organization under free licenses in February 2025, and Ondsel contributions carried significant weight in FreeCAD 1.0. The FreeCAD Project Association funded continued development of the CAM workbench, Assembly, Sketcher and variables/variant parts.
What has to be true
- FreeCAD's hard-to-learn, workbench-based UX meant the collaboration layer couldn't fix adoption: the underlying usability gap was the real barrier for commercial CAD users (Hackaday).
- Roughly 100 engineer interviews produced sympathy, not willingness to pay: hobbyists rooted for Ondsel while professional teams stayed with entrenched, school-taught commercial CAD (Habr).
- Without a scalable business model, venture backing never followed, and two years of runway wasn't enough to find one (Ondsel goodbye, via Habr).
- The value created was real but non-commercial: the Lens code and assembly work all survived as free software, proving the engineering was easier to sustain than the business.
What can be applied
A beloved open-source community is not a market: Ondsel found sympathy from hobbyists but no repeatable willingness to pay from professional CAD teams, and goodwill alone can't support a VC startup.
Aftermath
After Ondsel shut down in November 2024, the code for Ondsel Lens — the cloud workspace layer for FreeCAD teams — was transferred to the FreeCAD organization in February 2025 and released under free licenses (AGPL-3.0, LGPL-2.0+, Apache-2.0). Ondsel developers' work flowed into FreeCAD 1.0, including the Assembly workbench, Sketcher improvements and variables/variant parts, funded by FreeCAD Project Association grants. Its postmortem — roughly 100 engineer interviews, no scalable business model — fueled debate over whether open-source CAD can ever support commercial companies.
Sources
- The End Of Ondsel And Reflecting On The Commercial Prospects For FreeCAD
- We are shutting down Ondsel (Hacker News thread)
- Ondsel Lens has been moved to FreeCAD
- Команда коммерческого проекта Ondsel объявила о закрытии
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