When you rent an AutoCAD drafter from us, you get hands-on drafting work, and deliberately nothing beyond that. We draft and model. We do not do calculations, we do not give structural advice and we do not handle permits either. That boundary is not modesty but a choice, because drafting capacity is exactly the bottleneck clients come to us with.
OutsourceCAD provides outsourced CAD drafting to companies that do not have enough drafters of their own, often in high volumes and with a lot of repetition.
The work covers 2D drafting, 3D modelling where needed, as-built drawings and revisions to existing sets. We carry out everything remotely from our own office, in our own environment and on our own licences. This service started last year because a client asked for it, and we have offered it as a regular part of our work ever since. Below you will find what is needed to get started, who this is relevant for, what we deliver and how capacity moves with your schedule.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Getting started when you rent an AutoCAD drafter
Getting started takes little preparation, but the pace stands or falls with what you supply. We can start as soon as there is enough information to draft responsibly. In practice that means three things: the project details, the drawing conventions used within your organisation and the files that already exist. The latter is usually an existing set that needs revising. If documents are missing, we point that out straight away when we go through the material rather than running into it halfway. An incomplete file is not a blocker either, by the way.
With an as-built file that had partly been drawn by hand, we worked out the missing information ourselves instead of calling the client about it every day. We respond to an enquiry within 1 to 2 working days. This is followed by a conversation in which we go through the project and indicate which part lends itself to outsourcing. If you want to rent an AutoCAD drafter without handing over a large package straight away, you can start small.
A short assignment is open for discussion and gives the most honest picture, because your project leader then sees first-hand how fast and how accurately we work. No onboarding period is needed, because everyone on the team has been working with CAD for more than ten years. Nor does an account or workstation have to be set up, because we run on our own licences. That saves the IT process that normally eats up the first weeks when hiring in, and it keeps the start simple.
Which clients rent an AutoCAD drafter
Our clients are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly companies where technical drafting work is constantly waiting to be done. The people at the table are usually managers, team leaders and owners who oversee the schedule. They rarely have a technical question and almost always have a capacity question. The trigger is the same in almost every conversation: too little time, too few drafters, or a peak their own team cannot handle. Sometimes a drafter vacancy has been open for months without a suitable candidate.
Sometimes three projects come in at once that would each have been perfectly manageable on their own. An organisation that considers renting an AutoCAD drafter usually does so because waiting is no longer an option. What stands out is that the bottleneck rarely lies in the difficult work. The drawing office usually prefers to keep the complex details in-house, because that is where expertise and client contact come together. What gets left behind is the volume: the hundred-and-fiftieth section, the revision round across a complete set of sheets, the part drawings that all differ slightly from each other.
That is exactly the part we take over, and it is where the benefit to the schedule becomes visible fastest. Our clients are based in the Netherlands and our focus is on the Dutch market, covering the whole country. So far we work with one client, Firefly, for whom we have completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings. There are no public reviews yet, so we would rather let delivered work make the case than a list of ratings nobody can really weigh up.
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.
Drawing types and output from rented AutoCAD drafting
The bulk of the work we deliver is 2D drafting. We also provide 3D modelling where the project calls for it, plus as-built drawings and revisions. Broken down by drawing type, this means floor plans, sections, elevations, detail sheets, part drawings and assembly drawings. MEP work adds piping schematics, arrangement drawings and detail sheets for penetrations. In a revision round we go through an existing set, bring it back into line and apply the changes consistently across all sheets, title blocks included. We deliver the output in the format you use: DXF, DWG, the Revit formats or STEP, as well as any other common CAD format. Our main software is Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, supplemented by Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. Because we always work on the latest versions, version problems that cost time rarely arise when files come back.
The structure follows your drawing conventions, so layers, naming, title blocks and sheet layout match your existing library. What you will not get from us is a calculation, a structural assessment or a permit application. We hold that line firmly, even when a client asks for it halfway through a project. The intellectual property of everything we draw belongs to you, so no version stays behind with us that anyone lays claim to. A package can be a one-off or run across a series of consecutive projects. We deliver in stages, gather feedback, make adjustments and carry on, so you can see what is coming in as the work progresses.
Scaling up drafting capacity and cover for absence
Capacity is the core of this service, which is why it is the point where we want to be sharpest. With our large, variable team, we scale up or down for each project to match what the work requires. Those people do not have to be recruited, because the team already exists and is already working on live projects. If something urgent comes in, we add capacity immediately without any intermediate step.
That is fundamentally different from a vacancy, which takes months while the peak is happening now. If someone on our side drops out through illness or holiday, we bring in a replacement so the work continues.
You do not carry that risk, nor do you pay ongoing salary costs when the workload drops. We do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, so the effort follows demand, not a contract form. Billing is per hour or per project at a fixed price, agreed together, and we only charge for actual working hours. A drafter who steps away from the screen for a moment does not charge for those minutes. When a deadline could not move in the past, the team worked through evenings and weekends with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, even during a planned holiday of Sam, our team leader.
We do not present that as standard, and we certainly do not promise it. It does show that scaling up with us is about real commitment. How many drafters a project needs is something we decide based on the schedule and the size of the package.
Frequently asked questions about renting an AutoCAD drafter
Let us take on your AutoCAD drafting
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.