Ondsel

» see ondsel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

FreeCAD is the open source parametric CAD program, first released in 2002, used by people who model physical objects and do not have a SolidWorks license. It is capable and it has never been easy to love. For twenty years the standing question around it was whether a company could make a living from it, the way companies make a living from Linux and Postgres.

Ondsel was the attempt. It started at the beginning of January 2023 in San Francisco, founded by Brad Collette, a long-time FreeCAD contributor who maintained the Path workbench and had written books about the program, with funding from Open Core Ventures, the fund Sid Sijbrandij of GitLab set up to do precisely this. The model was open core: the base stays free and the layer above it pays the salaries.

They shipped two things. Ondsel ES was their own build of FreeCAD with a reworked interface and a faster release cadence. Lens was the cloud half, a service for storing and sharing models, with public or private links, PIN protection on the shares, and parametric models you could adjust in a browser and download.

Then they went looking for the customer. Surveys, plus interviews with close to a hundred mechanical engineers and workshop owners. The answer came back warm and unprofitable: independent users and hobbyists wanted them to succeed and said so, and the businesses stayed with the licenses they already had.

~ the dossier ~

~ the other kind of engineer ~

Ondsel's hundred interviews were with mechanical engineers, and I am the other kind. My degree says computer engineer and I spend my days on vision models that have to run on a drone, so the part of the pipeline I live in starts after somebody else has settled what the airframe looks like. I have opened FreeCAD, badly, to understand a bracket that was handed to me. So my standing here is secondhand: adjacent to the people Ondsel needed, close enough to watch them not buy it.

~ what it shipped upstream ~

What Ondsel left behind is inside FreeCAD. It contributed an integrated assembly workbench, a thing the program had lacked for its entire life, along with the 3D constraints solver underneath it. It reworked Sketcher and TechDraw, and added VarSets, a custom properties system. Between the May 2024 release and the shutdown, 145 pull requests from the Ondsel team were merged upstream.

That work landed in FreeCAD 1.0, and the goodbye post claims some credit for the release being better than the project had hoped. There is also a version that never shipped. Ondsel ES 2024.3 was canceled on the grounds that everything in it was free software already and headed into FreeCAD regardless.

~ no gap to fill ~

The honest account is in the post itself. Closed-source CAD is taught in schools and sits deep inside how established companies work, so Ondsel knew from the beginning that it had to coexist with tools already in place rather than displace them. It never found a repeatable reason for a business to pay. Collette's own phrasing is that they "failed to find commercial adoption to justify a venture-capitalized startup", and ran out of runway while still searching for product-market fit.

Open core works when the free thing is infrastructure a company cannot operate for itself. A CAD seat is not that. A workshop with somebody's license and somebody's training in place has no gap for a hosted model viewer to fill, however good the viewer is.

~ the date on its own goodbye ~

ondsel.com is still up, frozen, and it disagrees with itself about when any of this happened. The goodbye post renders its date on the page as "October 30, 2025", a year after the fact, while the machine-readable attribute inside the same tag reads 2024-10-30. Somebody rebuilt the site after the company stopped existing and the build got the year wrong. The FAQ is the page that answers plainly, in the past tense, on whether Lens still works: "No, we shut it down on November 22, 2024." Every page on the site still carries a 2025 copyright line.

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