So really, what's the deal?
I'm Colin Kingsbury, the nut behind the wheel at MakeMeACabinet. I'm a 30-year software industry veteran and 10-time Inc. 5000 award-winning entrepreneur, and in my spare time I like to build things with my hands to “touch grass,” as the youth like to say.
After drawing my 50th domino mortise by hand in a CAD app, I got annoyed (always a dangerous thing) and wondered why there wasn't a good, free-to-use tool to knock together simple cabinets and drawer boxes. I decided to try building the tool I wished I had — and as often happens, the project got out of hand and next thing I knew I was shipping a full design tool with end-to-end CAD/CAM capabilities.
Shareware for the 21st century.
The software industry is undergoing dramatic change with the arrival of AI, and MakeMeACabinet is my attempt to build a new model for this new world. The goal: an amazing tool that helps DIY and professional tradespeople design, quote, and build cabinets faster than ever before — and let everyone use it for free.
If you're Gen X like me, you'll remember that long before everything came with a subscription fee, ads, and in-app purchases, we had donationware — floppy disks passed from person to person that were free to use, and invited the recipient to mail the author a few bucks if they found it useful. I think it's time we give that business model a fresh look.
In the coming weeks, as I move toward what I consider a first production-grade release, you can expect to see things like Patreon and Ko-fi links inside the product. I'm looking into affiliate links, so if you need to buy drawer slides or other hardware to build the cabinet you just designed, you can click a link and support this at no extra cost. If I ever get around to a newsletter, I might let vendors sponsor it. I may eventually build some more commercially-oriented features like project and production management, and those may be explicitly subscription-only — but the core functionality to design and fabricate a cabinet will always stay free.
No en$#@!ification. No slop.
What I won't do is lard this up with ads, sell your personal information to all comers, or pull a bait-and-switch and suddenly convert everything to subscription-only. This project is an experiment in trying to build a different kind of software business.
Thanks for taking a look. If you build something with this, I'd love to hear about it — and if it saves you time at the saw, consider passing the link to another woodworker.
Ready to build?
Free to use. No account needed. Your first cabinet plan is a few clicks away.