If you are working out how much a CAD drafter costs to hire, you usually already have a vacancy that just will not fill. Or there is a peak, with three projects entering the drafting phase at the same time and a drawing office that can handle two. Sometimes it is simply a deadline that could not move and has now come closer than the work.
In all three cases it is about capacity, not knowledge, because you know exactly what needs to happen and are only short of hands.
We supply those hands. We draft in 2D, model in 3D where needed, produce as-built drawings and handle revisions, entirely remotely from our own office. What we do not do is engineering, because calculating and advising stays with you. On this page you can read how our costs are built up, how quickly we scale up, how a project runs and which companies this works for. There is no figure here, because an honest estimate only follows from the documents and a conversation.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
How much a CAD drafter costs per hour or per project
We work in two forms: by the hour or per project at a fixed price. We decide together in the first meeting which form fits. For a tightly defined package of drafting work, clients often choose the fixed price, because the budget is then set. For ongoing support of your own drawing office, an hourly basis works better, because the effort then moves with whatever comes in that week. On that hourly basis, we bill genuine working hours only. If a team member steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops. That may sound petty, but it is exactly the core of how we handle a timesheet.
We offer no prepaid hours card and no monthly hours subscription, so the invoice never shows capacity that stood idle. There is also a side that does not appear on our invoice but still counts in the comparison. A permanent drafter costs salary, employer's contributions, holiday days, a workstation, hardware and a licence, and those costs continue when the work drops off. With us, you pay no ongoing payroll costs. We work in our own environment with our own licences, so nobody on your side needs to set anything up.
What further brings costs down is fairly predictable. Complete documents up front, clear drawing conventions, repetition in the work and a fixed meeting rhythm together take most of the searching out of a project. That is precisely where the hours nobody is happy about sit. We only prepare an estimate after we have seen the work, because a figure without documents does not hold up. We would rather have that conversation at the start than halfway through a project.
From one CAD drafter to a large, flexible team
A vacancy for a drafter often stays open for months. We do not need to recruit anyone. The team is already in place, and we deploy what the project needs, from a single drafter for quiet periods to as many drafters from our large, flexible team as the volume justifies. For urgent work we add people straight away. That is possible because everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so there are no months of onboarding before output starts. The core of our team has around twenty-five years of experience combined.
Sam, our team leader, leads that team. After more than fifteen years in architecture, seven working years in Iran and his own design practice in the Netherlands, he still works as an engineer today. He divides the work, oversees the technical side and supervises the project, so you do not have to manage six separate drafters yourself. Scaling up does have one practical condition: the work has to be divisible. For a building that means per section, for an installation per route, for a product line per series. We make that division in advance.
If someone drops out through illness or holidays, we put someone else in and it simply carries on. When the volume drops, we scale back without a notice period. For a deadline that could not move, we have worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, even during a planned holiday of Sam. That remains an exception, but it shows how we view an agreed date.
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.
How a project with our CAD drafters runs
It starts with a conversation, usually by phone. Barry, our project manager, picks up the new enquiry and asks the questions needed to determine whether we are a good fit for the work. We respond to an enquiry like that within 1 to 2 working days. Sam then takes over the technical side and looks at the documents you have supplied. You supply the details and usually existing drawings that need revising. If anything is missing, we name it before a single line is drawn. With enough information, we can start straight away. We then deliver in batches. The first batch goes out early, precisely so that you can correct it before the rest goes in the same direction. We collect that feedback, make adjustments and carry on. Every batch passes through at least three review layers: the drafter produces it, a second team member checks it, Sam assesses the technical side and Barry gives it a final look.
Contact runs via email, phone and meetings, at a rhythm we agree with each client. On larger projects we use software that you can log in to and follow the project yourself. We work to your standards and drawing conventions, because the set has to fit into your system, not ours. At the end, the intellectual property of everything we draw belongs to you. If the scope turns out to be growing along the way, we put that to you before we continue. We find a surprise on the timesheet just as annoying as you do.
Companies that hire a CAD drafter through us
We work for engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly for companies with technical drafting work. There is rarely a buyer at the table. We usually speak to a manager, a team leader or the owner, someone who is personally responsible for the schedule and feels the pressure when it slips. What those companies share is a capacity problem, not a knowledge problem.
At an engineering firm, production work piles up while their own people are working on the design. At a manufacturer, the same component comes back in twenty variants and takes a disproportionate amount of time. We see this strongly in greenhouse construction, where piping diagrams are in AutoCAD and a valve in 90 and in 110 has to be drawn by hand again every time.
With a smart family in Revit, that component is placed in a single action, and in that work it saves at least seventy per cent of the time. We focus on the Netherlands, because that is where our clients are. So far we work with one client, Firefly, and have completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings for them. We started this service last year because a client asked for it, and we have offered it as a permanent service ever since.
If you want to know whether this fits your situation, you can start with a small first assignment. So far clients have not asked for a non-disclosure agreement, but we are open to an NDA. If you would like to put your situation to us, give us a call or fill in the contact form on this site. We will then go through the project with you in a conversation.
Frequently asked questions about how much a CAD drafter costs
Hire an experienced CAD drafter through us
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.