VectorForge — CAD with Live Strength Simulation (Lifetime Licence, No Subscription)

See your part bend before you print it.

Every maker has done it: design a bracket, print it for three hours, snap it in two seconds. VectorForge ends that loop. Pin a face, hang a weight on another, and a glowing stress map appears on the part itself — then it stays live. Thicken a rib and watch the red fade. Add a fillet and see the hot spot vanish. Pattern six holes and know instantly whether you just built a hinge.

This isn’t a simulation you run at the end. It’s a simulation you design with.

Model it. Load it. Forge it.

Strength you can see, instantly.
A finite-element solve re-runs on every edit — on your GPU, with every vector living on the graphics card. Results publish while they converge, so the heat map sharpens under your cursor instead of making you wait. No GPU compute? It drops to a solver that uses every CPU core you have. Either way, you keep working.

Loads that follow your design.
Fixes and forces are attached to the geometry, not to coordinates. Extrude, fillet, mirror, pattern, step back in the timeline — nothing to re-apply, nothing to set up twice.

Real units, real materials.
Type 500g, 2lb, 10N, 1.5kN. Pick PLA, PETG-class nylons (PA-6, PA-12), ABS, PC or aluminium, or type your own E / Poisson / yield. Stress turns red the moment it passes your material’s yield. Add gravity with one click.

Built for speed, not for menus.
Every tool is one key. Hover an edge and tap f to fillet, x to chamfer, n to set a length. Grab a load arrow and swing it with the mouse, snapping to axes. Linear and rotational patterning in two clicks.

A workspace that looks like it should.
Dark, high-contrast, neon-edged. Cyan sketches, magenta tools, stress maps that glow. The kind of screen you leave open because it looks good.

Yours. Locally. Forever.
VectorForge runs entirely on your machine. No account, no cloud upload of your designs, no “your trial has ended,” no feature that quietly moves to a higher tier next year. Files are plain text you can diff and version. STL export straight to your slicer.

One price. No subscription. Ever.

Other CAD tools rent you your own work. VectorForge is $49.99 once, and the licence is perpetual: install it on every Linux machine you own, keep it offline, keep it after we’re gone.

That’s less than 2 months of a “hobbyist” subscription — and you’ll still own it when they’ve raised the price twice.

What you get

• Instant download: a single 2.7 MB AppImage (yes, megabytes). Make it executable, double-click, design.
• Licence key by email within minutes.
• Full source build instructions for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch.
• Example project to load-test the moment it opens.
• 30 Day money-back guarantee — if it doesn’t change how you design, you pay nothing.

Specs