FormCalc: Formwork Design & Planning Software Inside AutoCAD

Pricing follows the steps above. A paid Discovery starts at $5K and an optional live pilot at $7K, both credited into the build. The production build starts at $25K, with an annual Platform & Care plan from $5K plus $1,500 per named seat. A typical mid-size deployment lands at $35K to $70K for year one, all in. Discovery gives you a fixed price on your own numbers before you commit.

Plan on 8 to 12 weeks end-to-end: Discovery 1 to 2 weeks, an optional pilot 3 to 5 weeks, and the production build 6 to 10 weeks, depending on how many formwork systems and geometry types you need. You will see the engine running against your own drawings during the pilot, not at the very end.

Yes, that is what the pilot is for: a fixed-price proof on one of your live projects, judged against your own engineers’ manual result. Pilot and Discovery fees are credited into the build.

The engine is configured to your catalogue: DOKA, PERI, ULMA, MEVA, Acrow, or your own proprietary panels and tables. It works from your real sizes, connection hardware, load ratings, and yard stock, not a theoretical panel set. Running a mixed or proprietary fleet is our core use case, not an exception.

That is where automation helps most. Irregular perimeters, openings, level changes, and curved elements create a combinatorial problem that scales nonlinearly, exactly where manual calculation gets slow and conservative. FormCalc was built for the structures where generic tools break down.

The FormCalc deployment delivered a 70% reduction in formwork calculation costs and 85% faster turnaround. One project we analysed had $180,000 in material waste from manual calculation errors alone. For firms running multiple formwork design cycles annually, the system typically pays for itself within 2-3 projects. Beyond direct cost savings: senior engineers freed from repetitive calculation work, elimination of recalculation bottlenecks during design changes, and consistent output quality that doesn’t depend on who runs the calculation.

No. The system works inside AutoCAD – engineers continue working in their existing environment. FormCalc reads structural geometry directly from the current drawing, so there’s no data export, no separate software to learn, and no workflow disruption. It replaces the calculation layer, not the engineering workflow.

Design changes are one of the biggest cost drivers in manual formwork calculation – each revision forces 1-3 days of full recalculation. With automation, recalculation triggers directly from the updated AutoCAD drawing. Column repositioned, beam depth changed, slab thickness modified – the system recalculates affected formwork zones automatically, keeping procurement timelines intact instead of adding days to the critical path.

You keep the comparison report and your rules captured in writing. Nothing is deployed during the pilot, so there is no software to license or maintain if you decide not to proceed.

Generative AI writes text and code probabilistically. Formwork layout is a deterministic combinatorial optimisation problem – solved against your real panel catalogue, load ratings, and site safety restrictions, where a wrong answer costs real money on site. A general-purpose AI can draft code, but it can’t guarantee a layout, and no one stands behind its output. FormCalc ships with an acceptance test – our layout and BOM hold up against your engineers’ manual result – and a contractual commitment: if it ever produces a wrong number, fixing it is our problem. We use AI heavily in development ourselves; that’s already priced into the build. What AI doesn’t replace is your captured rules, a verified engine, and accountability.

That’s what Discovery answers with data rather than opinion. We map your candidate workflows – panel layout, tableform, backpropping, takeoff and BOM generation, shop drawings, and any proprietary steps you run – and rank them against three criteria: engineering hours consumed per project multiplied by project frequency, how clearly the rules can be captured, and whether the drawing data is already available. Phase one starts where payback is fastest. Because it’s one engine underneath, every other workflow then extends from the same platform – added incrementally as each pays off, with no re-buying and no second integration.