u/Rockstonerable

I'm David, an architect in Vilnius. This one is not for everyone, and that is the point. If your PDFs are light, skip this. But if you open heavy drawings and larger sets exported from ArchiCAD (or other apps), and you have quietly made peace with the spinning wheel every time one loads and with laggy navigation, then you are exactly who I am looking for.

I got tired of being the one waiting, so I built my own desktop app, Ncored. It opens those heavy files right away and stays smooth on scroll, zoom, and pan, with markup and comment pins. Windows and Apple Silicon Mac.

Here is the real ask. I am shaping the next build around the first ~15 people who work in heavy drawings every day and are willing to tell me what would make it feel built for them. Not 15,000. Whatever those 15 push for goes straight into what I make next, so you would be shaping the tool, not just trying it. The first ones in tend to leave the biggest fingerprints on it.

Straight on scope so nobody wastes time: it is a fast view and markup tool. No measurement, takeoff, OCR, forms, or e-sign yet.

If you want to be one of the 15, just say so here in the comments. It is at ncored.com if you want to open a real file in it first. Individual experiences may vary.

And one real question for the room, whether you join or not: what do you open your heavy drawing sets in today, and what is the one thing you wish it did better?

I'm an architect, and my side project is Ncored, a desktop PDF editor built for one unglamorous problem: opening and marking up the huge drawing sets architects and engineers deal with all day. A general PDF tool chokes on a 50-200 MB+ set. Mine opens it fast and stays smooth on scroll and zoom.

I built it at night while running client projects, which was rough. But here is what surprised me: almost a hundred downloads and the first two paying customers came from the other side of the world (Australia and Germany), none from the channels I expected. Cold email and directories converted zero. The only things that moved anyone were an honest video and a Reddit thread.

I make short videos where I put it up against the tools people already use (Adobe, Bluebeam, Foxit): youtube.com/@ncoredpdf

Two things I keep chewing on, curious what you think:

- For a boring, deeply-niche B2B tool, is a founder-story angle worth it, or should I stay purely product and demo?

- Buy-once vs subscription: I offer both, but buy-once seems to be what actually converts this audience. Anyone else seeing that?

I'm an architect in Vilnius. Built Ncored a Mac+Windows PDF editor, because Adobe and PDF-XChange lagged on 50-100MB CAD drawings. Built it for my studio first. Started selling it because I wanted to keep improving it.

Yesterday I launched on SideProject. Currently 320+ upvotes, 0.94 ratio, 63 comments, 65k views. Subscription pricing model: roasted.

The pattern emerged within the first 2 hours. 5 separate commenters explicitly asking for lifetime instead of subscription:

- Top comment (88↑): "Desktop software has no right to demand a subscription. Especially if it doesn't require external resources."

- Another (15↑): "I'd pay €100 if it was just one-off payment. Subscription? Hard pass."

- And (3↑): "Add a €150 one-time payment and give people the option."

- A potential buyer (2↑): "Considering buying, but only for lifetime."

- Anti-sub voice (20↑): "Why should I spend my money on something I don't own?"

And the comment that broke me: "You became the monster you promised to defeat."

So I built it. Lifetime: €159 once, capped at first 100 customers, then I reassess. Sketch / JetBrains model. Wired up Paddle + webhook + UI in the evening. Posted the update in the thread.

First paying customer arrived 2 hours later, while I was on the balcony with tea. €159 minus Paddle fee minus VAT = ~€135 net. Then 4 more downloads in the same window (no purchases yet).

What I'm wrestling with now:

For context, I read the famous "Sold 340 lifetime deals for $149, regret every one" post here a few weeks back. The 100 cap + reassess-after framing was my deliberate hedge against that exact failure mode.

Now I'm 18 hours in, 1 paid lifetime customer, watching what happens.

Anyone shipped a similar mid-launch pricing pivot? What did your conversion curve look like 2 weeks / 2 months out? Did the lifetime tier cannibalize subscription, or did it serve a separate segment that wouldn't have paid subscription anyway?

Genuinely asking, not karma farming.

hey everyone

I'm an architect in Vilnius. When I open a 50-100MB CAD drawing in Adobe Acrobat (AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, Revit exports), it opens slowly. Foxit isn't much better. PDF-XChange runs only on Windows, and on big CAD files it slows the same way. But the worse problem is what comes after.

Panning the drawing stutters. Zooming reveals chunks loading half a second late. Sometimes the app freezes mid-pan for a couple seconds, completely unresponsive. Every interaction has friction. Workflow constantly interrupted.

Bluebeam fixed this on Windows. They killed the Mac version in 2020. The official workaround for Mac is Parallels + Bluebeam at ~$360/year, plus 8GB RAM for the VM to idle. That felt absurd. And it leaves Windows-only firms still dealing with Adobe (and similar PDF tools) lagging on the daily-driver side.

So I built Ncored. Mac and Windows, same product. Opens 50-100MB CAD PDFs in under a second and pans them smoothly. No chunk-loading, no mid-scroll freezes. Side-by-side video of Ncored vs Adobe below. You'll see the interaction difference, not just the open speed.

**what Ncored does**

- Smooth pan and zoom on heavy CAD PDFs (the actual daily pain)

- Markup, page management, text editing

- Atomic save (no corruption mid-write on large files)

- Works fully offline, no cloud lock-in

**the build**

- Worked on it for a long time, mostly evenings after the studio closed

- Most of the effort went into making pan and zoom feel smooth on heavy files (the hard part)

- A few engineer friends tested it throughout the build

- Shipped to Mac and Windows installer

**what Ncored doesn't have yet**

- Batch digital signing (Bluebeam still owns that)

- Studio-style cloud collab (working on it)

**pricing**

- Free 14-day trial: download it, open it, try it. No signup or card needed.

- €12.99/mo or €79.99/yr (~$86)

Would love honest feedback on Ncored. Tell me what's broken, missing, or just bad. Especially if you've fought Adobe or Foxit lag on big CAD files too.

**EDIT 2026-05-26:** thanks to everyone in this thread who pushed back on the subscription model. shipped a lifetime tier in response. €159 once, first 100 customers only, then closed permanently. existing buyers grandfathered forever, regardless of any future pricing change. details in the pinned comment below.

Native macOS PDF editor I've been working on, built for users who routinely open 100–300 MB CAD/BIM exports.

Video is 1:1 — same Mac (MacBook m4 pro), same file, same moment. No edits.

Why I'm posting in here: the Mac build shipped today, Apple-signed + notarized, and you're the audience that actually notices when an app feels native.

Things this thing focuses on:

- Stays responsive on 200 MB files (pinch zoom + scroll don't stutter)

- Quick Look–style fast opening, even for 200+ page documents

- Native window controls, native file dialogs, native fonts

- Crash-safety: if it ever crashes mid-edit, your work is recovered on next open

- Memory footprint stays bounded on long sessions

Features: inline text editing, annotations + signatures (with verification), full-document search incl. text inside scanned images, page management, redaction, flatten, image export, auto-save + crash recovery.

What it isn't: a 200-feature Acrobat clone — we cut a lot deliberately.

Pricing:

- 14-day free trial, no card

- €12.99/month or €79.99/year (≈49% less than monthly). No tiers, no upsells.

Disclosure: I'm one of the makers (the team behind Noir Architects, a Baltic architecture studio that built this for our own daily work first). Honest feedback welcome, especially the rough edges.

Download: https://ncored.com

I'm a partner at Noir Architects, a Baltic architecture studio. For years our team fought the same fight every week: open a 150 MB+ PDF coming out of our drawing software, try to mark it up, watch Adobe / Nitro / Bluebeam either spin or freeze for 30 seconds at a time.

We tried every obvious tool. Bluebeam came closest, but the workspace is buried under hundreds of features we never touch — onboarding a new hire takes a full week.

After one too many freeze-ups during a client presentation, we put together a small team and built the PDF editor we actually wanted. Two years of work later it's been running daily inside our own studio for months, and we just opened it up publicly.

What it focuses on:

- Heavy engineering / construction PDFs that break every other tool

- Annotations, text editing, signatures, search, page management

- Native macOS (Apple-signed + notarized) and Windows

- A deliberately small set of features that we actually use — no toolbar maze

What it isn't:

- A 200-feature Acrobat replacement (we cut a lot on purpose)

Pricing:

- 14-day free trial, no card

- €12.99/month or €79.99/year (≈49% less than monthly). Two plans, no upsell tiers.

Disclosure: I'm one of the makers. Two honest asks:

1. If you've shipped a paid desktop app on macOS + Windows, what's one piece of advice you'd give about launch week?
2. If you're a heavy PDF user — what was the file that finally broke whatever tool you used before?

Link: https://ncored.com