Two people, thirteen years, one application
Cut Solver has never had an office, an investor or a third employee. It was written because one of us was wasting sheets and the other one could do something about it, and it has paid for itself since the second year.
The two of us
One of us cuts sheets and one of us writes the solver, and we have swapped jobs often enough to respect both.
Douglas Ferrier
Cutting lists, testing, everything a customer sees
Douglas ran a four bench joinery shop for eleven years before any of this, mostly kitchens and fitted furniture. They kept sheet layouts in a hardback notebook, one page per kitchen, worked out with a scale rule on the train.
They still cut, one or two days a week, which is the reason the printed diagram is the shape it is. Every feature in this application has been used on a real sheet by the person who asked for it.
Rina Halvorsen
The solver, the application, the awkward arithmetic
Rina wrote scheduling software for machine tools for nine years, which turned out to be the same problem wearing different clothes: things that have to fit inside other things, with a cost for every gap.
They wrote the first solver over a winter, mostly to find out whether the notebook pages could be beaten. They could, by about two sheets a kitchen, which is where this started.
How it started
In 2012 Douglas was buying thirteen sheets for a kitchen that ought to have taken eleven, and had been for years, and had made a kind of peace with it. The notebook was good. It was not two sheets good.
Rina wrote something over that winter that took the notebook's worst page and did better. The first version had a parts list, one sheet size, a kerf setting and a printed diagram, and that was all. It shipped in September 2013 as version 1.0. It held up for about six months before the first customer asked for something, which turned out to be a trim allowance.
The first sale was to another shop on the same trading estate, for fifty dollars, paid in cash, which is a fact we have never worked out how to put on an invoice.
What happened next
It grew the way small tools do, which is one complaint at a time. Somebody was working in inches, so it learned inches. Somebody was cutting skirting rather than sheets, so it learned lengths. Somebody cut a door with the grain running the wrong way, so it learned grain direction.
The changelog is thirteen years of that, and you can read the customers in it if you know what you are looking at. Version 2.6 is a carpenter who cut architrave. Version 3.0 is everybody who ever had a pile of offcuts against a wall.
Why it is still two people
Because it works, and because the alternative is worse.
A two person software business can answer an email properly, still support a release from 2022, and say no to a feature without a meeting. It also cannot build everything, which is why the product page has a list of things this does not do that is nearly as long as the list of things it does.
We have been asked several times to take money to grow it. The honest answer is that we do not know what we would spend it on that would make your sheet count lower.
What we will not do
- Turn it into a subscription. The two one off licences will stay one off.
- Add an account you have to log into to use software you have already bought.
- Collect anything from the application. It does not send us anything, and that is not a setting.
- Break a file format. A job saved in 2015 opens in 4.4.
- Put a feature in the printed diagram that is there to remind you what you paid for.
Where we are
In two different places, several time zones apart, one of them a workshop unit and the other a room with a good chair in it. We have met in person eleven times in thirteen years and it has never once been a problem.
Everything reaches us at hello@cutsolver.com, which is genuinely both of us rather than a queue with a person's name on it.
No awards, no press, no logos
We have not won anything and nobody has written about us. There is no wall of customer badges on this site because we have never asked a customer for permission to use their name, and asking felt like a favour we would rather spend on something else.
The six jobs are the closest thing to a reference we have. They are written with the customer's agreement and without their name.
Thirteen years of numbers
- First releaseSept 2013
- Releases shipped12
- Whole number versions4
- People2
- Offices0
- Oldest version still supported3.5
Read on
What we have built, what it has been used for, and how to reach us.