Parametric 3D CAD · assemblies · live FEA · one payment

Professional CAD you own. $49.99. Once.

Sketch it, constrain it, pad it, thread it, pattern it, joint it, load it, break it on screen instead of on the bench. VectorForge is a full parametric modeler with real assemblies and finite-element analysis built in, fast enough to spin an entire gear train at 60 FPS on an eight-year-old machine, and it never asks you to log in, renew, or pay again.

Supported languages: English, German, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, Spanish

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Current version 1.0 · Release notes

$49.99 One payment. The price of a month of the big names, for life.

60 FPS A full gear train, every joint solved, on 2018 hardware. GPU viewport, every CPU core.

8 joint types Revolute, slider, cylindrical, ball, planar, screw, fixed and gear, driven by inverse kinematics.

0 logins No account, no license server, no telemetry, no cloud. Your files on your drive.

Watch the real software. No cuts, no speed-ups.

Every clip below is an unedited screen recording. What you see is what you get, the minute your download finishes.

Assemblies

A whole robot arm, moving under its joints.

Build the parts, click two pieces of geometry, and VectorForge infers the joint: a boss in a bore is a pin, two edges a slider, two faces a planar joint. Grab the gripper and the inverse-kinematics solver carries the entire chain with it, live, with a 3800X and a 2080 Ti barely waking up.

Revolute, slider, cylindrical, ball, planar, screw and fixed joints inferred from geometry
Gear joints couple two axes by ratio: whole gearboxes mesh and turn
Drive, limit and lock any joint; drag any part and the chain follows
GPU compute solver for large assemblies, CPU for the rest

Sketch to solid

Complex geometry in three clicks.

Draw the profile, click the axis, revolve. Draw the path, click the profile, sweep. Two sketches on any planes, loft. Horizontal and vertical are inferred as you draw, arcs follow your cursor, and a dragged point moves exactly as far as its constraints allow.

15 constraint types: horizontal, vertical, length, angle, parallel, perpendicular, distance, radius, on-line, tangent, on-circle, equal, fix, collinear, anchor
Under-constrained sketches flagged; conflicting constraints turn red so you know which one to fix
Revolve, groove, sweep, loft (straight or along a guide), shell, mirror, boolean fuse / cut / intersect
Involute spur gears as a sketch primitive: teeth and module, done

Threads that are real

Threads, in plain English.

Type M8x1.25 12 on a face and get a tapped hole with true helical geometry. Type 1/2 NPT and get a tapered pipe thread to ASME B1.20.1, crests turned to the taper like a real die would. Pattern it, mirror it, export it: it prints.

ISO metric tapped holes, threaded bosses and bores, coarse pitch from the table or any pitch you type
NPT pipe threads, 1/16" to 12", external and internal, tapered 1:16
Real geometry, not a texture: survives booleans, patterns, fillets, STL export and the simulation
Formed in milliseconds

Simulation

Find out it's too weak before you print it.

Pick a material, fix a face, type a force in N, grams or pounds, and the stress plot appears on the part. Change a fillet or a wall thickness and it re-solves behind you. No export, no separate workbench, no cloud credits.

Linear static FEA on a voxel hex mesh with a multigrid solver, automatic meshing
Displacement and von Mises stress, max stress flagged red against the material's yield
PLA, PA-6, PA-12, ABS, PC, 6061 aluminum presets, or type E, nu and yield
Gravity, 1x / 10x / 100x exaggeration, live re-solve on every edit; GPU compute on GL 4.3, all CPU cores otherwise

Timeline

Patterns of patterns of mirrors. All still editable.

Every operation is a step in a full parametric history with stable geometry references. Click a feature, drag, and the rotational pattern builds under your cursor. Edit a dimension from an hour ago and everything downstream regenerates, and a cut stays in the body it was made in.

Linear and rotational patterns, body and feature mirrors, patterns of patterns
Merge scope: a pocket cuts the body it was started on, or the one you point at
Group features into named parts; duplicate, mirror and pattern whole parts
Undo, redo, auto-save, human-readable project files

Modeling

Two sketches, one loft. Or a loft along an arc.

Loft between closed sketches on any planes, follow a sketched guide, or sweep a profile along a path with mitred corners and a twist-free frame. Ducts, nozzles, tubing and transitions between dissimilar shapes take seconds.

Loft, sweep, shell (in or out, open faces), chamfer, fillet, multi-edge in one feature
Multi-section lofts: face to sketch to face
Circle-to-square lofts matched by arc length, no kink
STEP and STL come in as real solids you can pad, pocket, thread and boolean

What people build with it

If it has parts that move, load, thread or bolt together, this is enough CAD.

Every one of these is a single VectorForge project: no plug-ins, no add-on tiers, no second program.

A rocket nozzle with a tapered pipe fitting

Revolve the throat and bell from one dimensioned profile, pattern 36 injector holes around the axis, cut a 1/2 NPT port into the manifold, and load the flange to see where it yields. All in one file.

A six-axis arm you can pose by hand

Model each link, joint them where the bosses meet the bores, set limits, grab the end effector and drag. The whole chain follows in real time.

A gearbox that actually meshes

Involute gears from a tooth count and a module, pins through their centres, gear joints coupling the ratios. Turn the input and watch the output.

A drone frame that survives the crash

Sketch the arms, pad, shell, fillet, then put 2 lb on each motor mount and see the stress in PLA versus PA-12 before the first print.

Vendor STEP files, made yours

Import a motor from the supplier's STEP, pad a bracket off its own mounting face, tap the holes, boolean it into the housing.

Ducts, manifolds and bent tubing

Draw the centreline on any plane, loft a circle into a rectangle along it, shell it to a wall thickness, add the mounting ears.

Just shipped

New in the last releases

Every one of these arrived free to every license holder. The release notes have the full list.

NPT pipe threads

Tapered pipe threads to ASME B1.20.1, external and internal, 1/16" to 12". Type 1/4 NPT on a face or right-click a boss.

Conflicts shown in red

When two dimensions disagree, the constraints that fight each other light up red so you know exactly which one to change.

Merge scope

A pocket or a pattern of pockets stays in the body it was made in, even when another part overlaps it, or cuts the body you point at.

Inferred horizontal / vertical

Lines drawn within four degrees of an axis snap to it and get the constraint, with its glyph on the rubber band. Shift draws free.

Shaded, transparent, wireframe

One tile (or V) cycles the view. See the bore through the housing, or just the edges.

ARM64, faster

Raspberry Pi, Rock Pi and friends: picking and overlays no longer stall the GPU every frame. One AppImage for every arm64 Linux.

The full picture

What it does

These are the parts that decide whether a CAD package can do real mechanical work. VectorForge has all of them, in one program, for one payment.

A constraint solver you can drag

Lines, rectangles, polygons, arcs, circles, involute gears and construction geometry. Fifteen constraint types, under-constrained sketches flagged, conflicts in red. Grab a point and the sketch moves exactly as far as the constraints allow.

Every solid operation

Pad, pocket, revolve, groove, sweep, loft, shell, chamfer, fillet, mirror, linear and rotational pattern, boolean fuse / cut / intersect. On a manifold boolean kernel that does not leave slivers.

Real threads, metric and NPT

Tapped holes, threaded bosses and bores with true helical geometry. ISO metric to M64, NPT pipe threads to ASME B1.20.1 with the 1:16 taper. They print, they pattern, they survive booleans.

Assemblies with eight joint types

Revolute, slider, cylindrical, ball, planar, screw, fixed and gear joints inferred straight from geometry. Drive, limit, lock, ground. Drag a part and inverse kinematics moves the chain.

Finite-element analysis inside the modeler

Fix faces, apply forces in N, g or lb, add gravity, pick a material. Displacement and von Mises stress on the part, max stress against yield, re-solved on every edit. GPU compute where there is GL 4.3, every CPU core otherwise.

A full parametric timeline

Stable geometry references mean a fillet placed on copy 2 of a pattern stays on copy 2. Change anything, anywhere, and the rest rebuilds. Nothing is ever baked.

STEP and STL as real solids

Imported bodies are editable: pad off their faces, pocket, thread, chamfer, fillet, shell, pattern and boolean them like anything drawn here. Export STL per part or whole model.

Built for the hardware you have

GPU viewport with GPU picking, every solver multithreaded, a feature cache that only rebuilds what changed. Real time on a laptop; usable on a Raspberry Pi.

Windows and Linux, x86-64 and ARM64

Windows 10/11 as a zip, Linux as a single AppImage (Debian 12 / glibc 2.36 or newer, including Raspberry Pi OS and Armbian). No installer, no admin rights.

Offline, private, yours

No account, no license server, no telemetry, no cloud. A small human-readable project file you can diff, back up and keep forever.

Fast to drive

A key for every constraint, right-click menus everywhere, values typed in plain English: M6 10, 500g, 1/2 NPT 15. Backspace repeats. Esc gets you out.

Tested like an engineering tool

Twelve automated suites run every build: geometry, threads, NPT, sweeps, lofts, shells, assemblies, FEA against beam theory, STEP round-trips, and every bug a customer has sent us.

The license

A perpetual license for one person and every machine they own. No seat audits, no license server, no files held in someone else's cloud. Read the whole thing in thirty seconds.

You can

Own everything you model
Personal work, client work, products you sell. No royalties, no claims.
Own the software
It never expires, never phones home and never asks you to renew.
Install it on all of your own machines
Desktop, laptop, the workstation at the shop.
Get every future version free
Point releases and major versions, for as long as VectorForge exists.
Work offline
There is no login and nothing to connect to.

You can't

Give copies to other people
One license per person. Coworkers need their own; buy several at once from the product page.
Resell, rent or sublicense it
The license is personal and non-transferable.

That is the whole license. Nothing in it changes later.

Against a subscription

The honest arithmetic. A typical subscription CAD seat is $500 to $3,000 a year, every year, and stops working the month you stop paying.

	VectorForge	Typical subscription CAD
Price	$49.99 once	$500 to $3,000 every year
Five years of use	$49.99	$2,500 to $15,000
Future versions	Included, forever	Only while you keep paying
Stop paying	Nothing changes. You own it.	It stops opening. Your files are hostages.
Offline use	Always. No login, no license server.	Periodic license check required
Your files	On your drive, human-readable	Often tied to a cloud account
Finite element analysis	Built in, updates live	Paid add-on or cloud credits
Assemblies and joints	Included, with inverse kinematics	Often a higher tier
Machines	All of your own	Limited seats or devices
Platforms	Windows, Linux, ARM64 boards	Usually Windows, sometimes macOS
Hardware use	GPU viewport, every CPU core, runs on a Pi	Varies; often needs a workstation
Changed your mind	14-day refund, any reason	Trial rolls into billing

The subscription column describes common industry practice, not a specific vendor. Prices are typical published list prices for individual seats.

One price. Everything. Forever.

Less than one month of most CAD subscriptions. You never pay again, and every feature we ship from now on is already yours.

VectorForge, full version

$49.99one-time

No monthly fee. No upgrade fee. No tiers.

Perpetual license. One person, every machine they own.

Parametric modeler with a draggable 15-constraint solver
Pad, pocket, revolve, groove, sweep, loft, shell, chamfer, fillet, mirror, pattern, boolean
ISO metric and NPT threads as real helical geometry
Assemblies: revolute, slider, cylindrical, ball, planar, screw, fixed and gear joints with inverse kinematics
Linear static FEA with live displacement and von Mises plots, six material presets
Full parametric timeline with named parts, patterns of patterns, merge scope
STEP and STL import as editable solids, STL export per part or model
GPU viewport, GPU compute solvers, every CPU core
Windows 10/11, Linux x86-64 and ARM64 (Debian 12 / glibc 2.36+)
No account, no telemetry, works offline
Every future version, free, for life
14-day money-back guarantee

14-day money-back guarantee, any reason. Download link and license key by email in minutes. Need several licenses? Set the quantity on the product page.

Questions people ask before they buy

If yours isn't here, email us. A human answers.

Is it really a one-time purchase?

Yes. $49.99 once. No subscription, no maintenance fee, no paid upgrade tier, no "pro" version hiding the good features. Every point release and every major version is included, for as long as VectorForge exists.

There's no trial. How do I know it's any good?

Three ways. Every recording on this page is an unedited capture of the real software. The release notes show exactly what gets fixed and how fast. And the purchase is covered by a 14-day money-back guarantee: buy it, use it for two weeks on your own parts, and if it isn't for you, email us for a full refund. That is a better trial than a crippled demo.

What does it run on?

64-bit Windows 10 or 11, and 64-bit Linux down to Debian 12 (glibc 2.36 or newer) on x86-64 and ARM64, so Raspberry Pi 4/5, Rock Pi and similar boards work. It needs OpenGL 3.1; the optional GPU compute solvers use OpenGL 4.3 where available and fall back to every CPU core where not. There is no macOS build.

How capable is the modeler, really?

Capable enough to build a rocket nozzle with a pipe-threaded manifold, a six-axis arm or a meshing gearbox in a single file. Sketches with a 15-constraint solver; pad, pocket, revolve, groove, sweep, loft, shell, chamfer, fillet, mirror, patterns and booleans on a manifold kernel; metric and NPT threads as real geometry; a full parametric timeline. It is not a surfacing or sheet-metal package.

How far does the assembly modeling go?

Eight joint types: revolute, slider, cylindrical, ball, planar, screw, fixed and gear. Joints are inferred from the geometry you click: a boss in a bore is a pin, two edges a slider. Drive and limit joints, lock them, ground a part, then grab anything and the inverse-kinematics solver moves the chain in real time, on the GPU for large assemblies.

What can the FEA do, and what can't it?

Linear static analysis: fix faces, apply forces in N, g or lb, turn on gravity, choose PLA, PA-6, PA-12, ABS, PC, 6061 aluminum or type your own E, Poisson's ratio and yield. You get displacement and von Mises stress on the part, the maximum flagged red against yield, re-solved on every edit. It is built for "will this bracket hold?" during design. It is not nonlinear, thermal, dynamic or contact simulation.

Are the threads real or just cosmetic?

Real. A tapped hole or threaded boss is true helical geometry swept along the pitch and combined through the boolean kernel. ISO metric from the coarse-pitch table or any pitch you type; NPT pipe threads to ASME B1.20.1 with the 1:16 taper, external and internal, 1/16" to 12". They export to STL, voxelise for the simulation, and survive patterns and fillets.

Which file formats does it read and write?

It imports STEP and STL as editable solid bodies and exports STL, per part or whole model. Your editable history is saved in the native .vforge format, a small human-readable text file. Formats added later are included in your license.

Why is it so fast?

The viewport and picking run on the GPU. The boolean kernel, sketch solver, mesher, FEA and assembly solvers run across every CPU thread (and on GPU compute where available). A feature cache rebuilds only what changed. Nothing waits on a server. That is why a whole gear train turns at 60 FPS on eight-year-old hardware, and why it is usable on a Raspberry Pi.

Does it need an internet connection or an account?

No. There is no login, no license server to reach, no telemetry and no file sync. Your models stay on your drive and the software works fully offline, forever.

Which computers can I install it on?

All of your own: desktop, laptop, the workstation at the shop, the Pi on the bench. The only rule is one license per person; you can't give copies to others.

I need licenses for a team. How does that work?

Set the quantity on the product page and check out once. Each license is for one person on all of their machines. You receive one key per license by email.

Who owns the designs I create?

You do. Personal projects, client work, products you sell: everything you model is yours, with no royalties, no watermarks and no restrictions.

How do I get it after I pay?

Checkout sends an email with your download link and license key within minutes. Unzip (Windows) or run the AppImage (Linux), enter the key once, start modeling. No installer, no admin rights.

How do updates work?

Every release is free. You get an email when a new build is out and download it from the same link you got at purchase. Everything is listed on the release notes page, including the bugs customers reported and the day they were fixed.

Why pay $49.99 when FreeCAD is free?

FreeCAD is good and we won't talk you out of it. VectorForge is a smaller, faster tool with one coherent workflow: a sketch solver you can drag, assemblies with real joints and inverse kinematics, threads you type in plain English, patterns that preview live, and FEA inside the modeler without configuring a workbench. If it doesn't earn its place in 14 days, you get your money back.

Why pay $49.99 instead of the free hobby tier of a big-name CAD?

Because the free tier is a lease. It can change terms, drop features, require a login, keep your files in a cloud account and end when the vendor decides. VectorForge is yours: offline, forever, with every future version included, for less than one month of the paid tier.

Is there a Mac version?

Not today. Windows and Linux only. If one ships later, it is included in your license.

What if I find a bug?

Email us the project file. Customer-reported bugs become regression tests in the automated suite, so once fixed they stay fixed, and the fix ships to everyone, free. The release notes name them.

Buy it once. Keep it forever.

$49.99. Windows and Linux, x86-64 and ARM64. Every future version included. Refund within 14 days if it isn't for you. The next part you design could be in it tonight.

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