In practice, the question behind drawing digitisation costs is this: what does it cost to convert a stack of paper, scanned or partly hand-drawn drawings into usable digital files? The honest answer is that it depends on the condition of the material, not on the number of sheets.
A sharp scan of a neat drawing goes through our process quickly. An as-built dossier that was printed incorrectly and partly updated by hand needs some detective work before a single line is in the right place.
We charge by the hour or at a fixed project price and only charge net working hours. We deliver in DWG, DXF, Revit formats or STEP, in your layer structure and naming. We do the drafting ourselves, in our own office, with our own licences and the latest versions. Below we show who this is relevant for, how our review process works, where the hours go and how we differ from a single freelancer or a permanent employee.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Who needs drawing digitisation
Our clients are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, as well as, more broadly, companies with technical drafting work. The people at the table are managers, team leaders and owners, people who keep an eye on the schedule and see an archive job being pushed back time and again. The trigger is almost always capacity: too little time, too few drafters, or a peak that the in-house team cannot handle. Digitisation is exactly the kind of work that gets left behind, because it is extensive, not very exciting and rarely urgent until it suddenly is.
We take that package off your hands. The volume does not put us off, because our team is set up for repetition. At Firefly, we received material in which the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and partly drawn by hand. The whole thing was poorly legible and messy. We sorted it out ourselves instead of calling the client about it constantly, and still delivered it neatly. We have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings for that client.
That is the kind of work companies come to us for: high volume, lots of repetition and a dossier that nobody in-house wants to pick up any more. We draft and do not do engineering, so the technical assessment of what is on the old drawing stays with you. What we deliver is a set that matches the material supplied, in your own format and standard. If you want to convert an archive, you do not need to free up your own people or break open your own schedule.
Three review layers when digitising drawings
In this type of work, the risk lies not in difficult geometry but in sloppiness across hundreds of sheets. A dimension copied incorrectly, a symbol that ends up on the wrong layer, a title block that does not match the rest of the set: things like that cost days later on. That is why our work passes through at least three review layers. A drafter draws, a second team member checks that work, Sam, our team leader, then checks it and Barry, our project manager, gives it a final look. In practice, this keeps errors to a minimum.
Sam has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, ran his own design practice in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer. He directs our CAD team and oversees the technical side. Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the core of our team has around twenty-five years of experience combined. Clients notice this especially with unclear source material, because experienced drafters recognise what was intended and know when a question is really necessary. We deliver in stages, so you can check early on whether our interpretation is correct.
If an assumption turns out to be wrong, we correct it before a hundred other sheets contain the same error. For the cost of a digitisation project, that matters more than fast drafting, because rework after the fact adds up quickly. We keep track of the assumptions we have made, so you can check them all in one go. We deliberately keep that review process in-house and do not burden you with it.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
The cost side of drawing digitisation
We charge by the hour or at a fixed project price, and both options occur in this work. A clearly defined stack of similar sheets can easily be covered by a fixed price. An archive whose exact contents nobody knows is something we prefer to tackle on an hourly basis, because a fixed price would then need a safety margin that you ultimately pay for. We only charge net working hours. If someone steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops, and that is exactly how it should be. We do not work with prepaid bundles of hours or a monthly hours subscription, so there is no fixed volume that nobody needs. What reduces drawing digitisation costs most is preparation at the source. Good scans instead of photos of a construction drawing save hours straight away. A clear set of starting points saves questions.
A supplied drawing standard with layer structure and naming prevents us from having to adjust the entire set afterwards. Repetition helps too, because as soon as we recognise a pattern in the sheets, we organise our work around it and the volume goes through faster. The required level of detail also plays a part, because simply transferring lines asks less of us than a complete set with symbols, text and correct layers. We discuss this in advance, so you can choose what the next stage really needs. We keep you informed of the hours used along the way, so there are no surprises halfway through the project. If you want to limit the hours, start with the source material, not with the negotiation.
Outsourcing digitisation versus a freelancer or a permanent employee
Hiring a freelancer often feels like the simplest step, and for a small job it sometimes is. With volume, that picture changes. One person has a maximum capacity, goes on holiday, falls ill and takes the knowledge built up about the dossier with them when they leave. We have a large, variable team that scales per project, so we divide a stack of hundreds of sheets across as many people as are needed.
If someone drops out, we replace them and the work continues. When things are urgent, we add people straight away, and when a deadline once could not slip, our team worked evenings and weekends to meet it.
A new permanent drafter is a different story. That involves recruitment, onboarding time and ongoing payroll costs, even in the months when there is no digitisation work. With us, you do not pay those payroll costs. You do get one fixed point of contact, because Barry picks up the request and Sam takes over the technical side. We work to your standard and drawing conventions, so the result fits into your existing environment, not ours.
Continuity differs too, because with us the knowledge of the dossier sits with several people rather than one drafter. If someone leaves, our team's working method simply stays in place. A short assignment is fine, and with a small first package you can judge our speed and accuracy before the entire archive is handed over.
Frequently asked questions about drawing digitisation costs
Let us digitise your drawings
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.