The work package for which people look for a self-employed technical drafter often looks the same in practice: a stack of existing DWGs that need a revision round, an as-built file that was never updated and a series of detail drawings that has been pushed back for months.
We take that package off your hands. OutsourceCAD provides outsourced CAD drafting to companies that do not have enough drafting capacity in-house, and that means drafting and modelling work, not engineering.
We produce 2D drafting and, where needed, 3D modelling, as-built drawings and revisions. Most of the work that comes to us involves high volumes and a lot of repetition. We have a large, variable team that scales with each project, and everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience. The work is carried out fully remotely from our own office, in our own environment with our own licences. Before a drawing is sent, it has passed through at least three review layers.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
When a self-employed technical drafter is enough and when it is not
Outsourcing is not always the right answer, and we have no need to claim otherwise. Work that is closely tied to design decisions that change daily is better kept in-house by a drawing office. The same goes for drawings where someone pops in to see the structural engineer every morning to agree a detail. Where outsourcing does pay off is with work that is clearly defined and comes in volume. Think of a revision round on an existing set, an as-built file that needs cleaning up, a series of detail drawings following a fixed pattern, or a piping schematic in which the same components keep recurring in different sizes.
That kind of work mainly calls for discipline and pace, and that is exactly what a team that does it all day long can deliver. A second consideration is duration. For a peak of a few weeks, recruiting is not an option, and looking for a self-employed technical drafter takes time you simply do not have at that moment. We can start as soon as we have enough information, and in urgent cases we add people from the existing team straight away.
Risk also plays a part. If you keep the work in-house, you also keep the holidays, sick days and ongoing payroll costs in-house. If you outsource it, you pay only for the hours worked and keep your own drafters available for the work where their expertise counts most. We regularly advise clients to keep the complex part themselves and hand the repetitive part to us.
The cost side of bringing in a self-employed technical drafter
Both an hourly rate and a fixed project price are possible, and we decide the form together with you. For a clearly defined package, such as a fixed number of drawings following a known pattern, a fixed project price makes sense because the scope can be assessed in advance. For work that is adjusted along the way, such as a revision programme in which new documents keep turning up, an hourly basis is fairer for both sides. We only bill pure working hours. With us, a five-minute coffee break means the clock stops immediately.
That is not a slogan but the way we keep our timesheets, and it is why billed time can always be traced back to delivered work. What keeps costs down above all is complete information from the outset. The more complete the details, drawing conventions and existing drawings are at the start, the less time goes into investigation. Repetition helps as well. Once a component or detail is right, what follows goes considerably faster, especially when we set it up as a parametric Revit family.
In addition, there are no ongoing payroll costs in quiet periods, and we do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription. We deliberately leave aside what a self-employed technical drafter charges. What we do is go through a project and indicate which billing method makes sense for it, so that you get an estimate that matches the actual size of the package. A short assignment is fine, and many projects start with a limited part of the set to test the way of working before more work is handed over.
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.
Clients who outsource technical drafting
Our clients are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly companies with technical drafting work. The people we deal with are managers, team leaders and owners, in other words people responsible for a schedule rather than for a single drawing. The problem they face is almost always capacity. Too little time, too few drafters, or a peak their own team cannot handle. At an engineering firm, this often shows up as drafting that lags behind the rest of the process, bringing the execution side of a project to a standstill. At an architectural practice, it is more often about detailed design and detailing that gets left behind because the design phase takes all the attention. Contractors run into as-built files that only come into view as handover approaches.
Manufacturers are faced with product documentation and part drawings whose number of variants increases as soon as another size is added. What these situations have in common is that the work itself is not complicated, but the volume does not fit into the available hours. In such cases, people look for a self-employed technical drafter because they think in terms of individuals. We prefer to offer capacity, with a large, flexible team that scales up or down per project and with cover when someone is ill or on holiday. Our focus is on the Netherlands, and that is where our clients are based. We started this service last year because a client asked for it, it worked well, and since then we have offered it as a standard service.
Working with a self-employed technical drafter, from first conversation to delivery
The search for a self-employed technical drafter usually starts with a profile, whereas with us it starts with a conversation. We respond to a new request within 1 to 2 working days, after which we go through the project by phone or in response to the contact form on the website. Barry, our project manager, is usually the first point of contact for new requests, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side.
With more than fifteen years of background in architecture, seven years of work in Iran and his own design practice in the Netherlands, Sam is still active as an engineer.
In that first conversation, we establish what needs to be done, which drawing conventions apply and which documents are available. Usually this includes existing drawings that need revising. Then we get to work and deliver in stages. We collect feedback, make adjustments and move on to the next batch. The rhythm varies per client, from meetings every two days on a tight project to weekly check-ins on a calmer one.
Day-to-day contact runs by email, phone and meetings, and on larger jobs you can log into software in which the project can be followed. We work to your standard and your drawing conventions, not our own. If you want to see how that works out first, you can start with a small initial assignment and judge our speed and accuracy on that basis. You hold the intellectual property of all our work.
Frequently asked questions about hiring a self-employed technical drafter
Hand your technical drafting over to 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.