Construction software is closed at exactly the layer that should be open. The file formats are ISO standards, the building codes are public law, and the carbon factors are published research — yet reading an IFC file, checking a plan against a code, or pricing a model's embodied carbon still means a paid seat in someone's suite, and an answer you cannot audit.
Not a diagram of an intention. qto and plancheck import ifc-spf; ecfactors imports qto. The arrows are in the dependency metadata.
Commercial software for firms building in Vietnam. Regulation encoded as data, priced in VNĐ, in Vietnamese.
Open-source software you run yourself. Install it, point it at your own files, read the source. No account, no upload, no seat.
Quantity takeoff from an IFC model, mapped to whichever cost-code standard you answer to.
Two model revisions in, a changelog a human will actually read out.
Building code as machine-readable rules, with a fixture for every rule.
Embodied carbon factors A1–A3 as a versioned dataset where every row carries its source.
A read-only BIM query server for agents, where every row cites the line it came from.
A vector floor-plan PDF goes in. Rooms, areas, doors, windows and an adjacency graph come out.
Lint an issued PDF drawing set for the mistakes that reach the field.
Drop a latitude and longitude. Get a one-page site context report.
Reviews a drawing set against Vietnamese standards and returns a structured non-compliance report.
An IFC model goes in. One HTML file comes out, and it is the whole viewer.
The layer everything else stands on: a standard-library IFC reader, and the conformance suite that keeps every reader honest.
Open, citable datasets. Published because the field needs them to exist, not because they sell anything.
Construction software is closed at exactly the layer that should be open. The file formats are ISO standards, the building codes are public law, and the carbon factors are published research — yet reading an IFC file, checking a plan against a code, or pricing a model's embodied carbon still means a paid seat in someone's suite, and an answer you cannot audit.
So we build in two layers. Underneath: a small, dependency-free open toolchain that reads models, checks drawings, prices carbon and answers questions with a citation back to the source line. On top: commercial products that carry Vietnamese regulation — NĐ 06/2021, QCVN 06:2022, NĐ 123/2020, Luật Đấu thầu 2023 — as data, not as a consultant's slide deck.
The open layer is not marketing for the closed one. It is the part we think should never have been closed.
Pilots, partnerships, or a bug in one of the open tools — the same inbox reads all three.