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Engineering Software You Can Sell

Turning an in-house CAD tool into a product: market, ownership, packaging, licensing, price, terms, channels and support

Turn an in-house engineering tool into a software product: test the market, secure ownership, package and license it, price with GST, meet consumer law and support it.

10 chapters · About 100 minutes · Free to read · Intermediate engineering business

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KEVOS® LibraryBUSINESS010203EngineeringSoftware You CanSellKEVOS® ORIGINAL BOOK10 CHAPTERS

About this book

Engineering firms build software all the time: macros that save hours, add-ins that check drawings, calculators that size parts, scripts that export data. Sometimes a tool is good enough that people outside the firm ask for it. The idea of selling it is attractive: the work is done, other firms have the same problem, and every copy sold is almost pure margin. The reality is that a tool that works in its own office is perhaps a third of a product. The rest is everything needed for strangers to install it, trust it, pay for it, get help with it and keep using it for years.

This book is for engineering firm owners, design managers and technical staff considering that step. It covers testing the market before spending money, making sure the firm actually owns what it plans to sell, turning a tool into a supportable product, installing and updating it at many sites, choosing a licensing model and protecting it without punishing honest customers, pricing it and handling GST, writing terms that respect the Australian Consumer Law, choosing between direct sales and resellers, and supporting the product through to its end of life. Each chapter works one decision through the running case with real numbers and ends with an exercise and its worked answer.

It assumes the reader understands their own engineering work and the tool they have built. It does not assume any background in software business, licensing or consumer law.

The running case

The book follows a fictional 12-person structural and mechanical design office that built a drawing-checking add-in for its own CAD system. The add-in checks each drawing before release for missing title-block properties, inconsistent revision tables, untoleranced dimensions and layer and style breaches. Inside the office it saves about a quarter of an hour on each of about 2,400 drawings a year. Several clients and two peer firms have asked whether they can buy it.

All quantities, prices, costs and results are invented for teaching. This is an illustration. None of it describes a KEVOS® product, client or result. Money is in Australian dollars, and each example says whether GST is included.

How to use the book

Read Chapters 1 and 2 before spending anything: they decide whether to go ahead at all. Chapters 3 and 4 cover the engineering of a product, Chapters 5 to 8 the commercial decisions and Chapters 9 and 10 selling and supporting it. The companion book CAD Automation by the Numbers covers building, testing and deploying a CAD tool for internal use, which is the foundation for everything here.

Source limits and professional responsibility

A 2009 book on developing and selling an add-in for one CAD system was supplied for this book. It was used only to choose the subject and identify the stages from tool to product. The structure, case, calculations, figures and exercises here are original. Legal and tax points are paraphrased from public guidance by Australian regulators and government agencies and are stated at a general level.

This book is educational. It is not legal, tax or financial advice. Consumer law, contract law, intellectual property and tax rules are detailed, change over time and depend on circumstances. Before selling software, a firm should take advice from a lawyer and an accountant on its own situation. An engineering software product also carries professional responsibility for what users do with its results, which no licence term entirely removes.

Who this book is for

Engineering firm owners, design managers and technical staff who have built a useful CAD add-in, calculator or automation tool and are considering selling it to other firms.

What you will learn

  • Test whether other firms will pay for an in-house tool before spending on productising it.
  • Check ownership of the code, its components and the name before selling anything.
  • Estimate the real effort and cost of turning a working tool into a supportable product.
  • Choose licensing, pricing and channels with the revenue and GST arithmetic worked through.
  • Write terms that respect the Australian Consumer Law and plan support and end of life honestly.

Inside this book

Chapters

  1. 01Test the market before the productFind out whether other firms will pay for an in-house engineering tool, using interviews, trials and a paid pilot, and compare the likely revenue with productising cost and lost fees.
  2. 02Own what you sellBefore selling an engineering tool, confirm who owns each part of its code, what third-party licences require, what the CAD vendor's terms allow and whether the product's name is free to use.
  3. 03Turn a tool into a productList the assumptions an in-house tool makes, estimate the work to remove them, make customer-specific rules configurable, write documentation strangers can use and test across customers' set-ups.
  4. 04Install, update and support many sitesPackage an engineering add-in for customers' IT departments, sign it, version it, release updates customers control, keep old configurations working and limit how many versions you support.
  5. 05Choose a licensing modelCompare perpetual and subscription licences, named and floating seats, trials and site licences on five-year revenue, cash flow, customers' budgets and the promises each model makes.
  6. 06Protect without punishing customersChoose a level of licence enforcement by weighing unlicensed use against the friction it puts on paying customers, buy rather than build licensing, and make sure a licence failure never stops work.
  7. 07Price it and handle GSTSet a price for an engineering add-in from the value it creates and the alternatives customers have, show GST clearly, issue proper tax invoices, plan volume prices and change prices fairly.
  8. 08Terms, refunds and consumer lawWrite licence terms that respect the Australian Consumer Law: consumer guarantees for software, unfair contract terms with small businesses, refunds and professional responsibility.
  9. 09Sell direct and through resellersCompare selling an engineering add-in direct and through CAD resellers: the trial funnel, three-year cost of each channel and a reseller agreement that keeps your options open.
  10. 10Support, roadmap and end of lifeMeasure support load and cost per seat, cut repeat questions at the source, plan releases from customers' needs, review the venture honestly and plan how the product would end.

Apply This in Practice

Use these KEVOS® tools to try the method from this reading with your own numbers.

References and source notes

The manuscript and worked examples are original KEVOS® writing. References inform particular concepts; their authors do not endorse this book. Web references were consulted on 26 October 2026.

  • Luke Malpass, AngelSix. SolidWorks 2009 API: Advanced Product Development, first edition (2008–2013). Supplied source, read for its subject map: planning a CAD add-in as a product, installers, licensing approaches, preparing a product for market, online and reseller distribution and marketing. All rights reserved; no text, code, figures or structure are reproduced. Its specific reseller percentages are not used.
  • Australian Taxation Office. Registering for GST (current web page). Source for the GST registration threshold of A$75,000 GST turnover (A$150,000 for non-profit bodies) used in Chapter 7. General information only.
  • business.gov.au, Australian Government. Goods and services tax (GST) (current web page). Background on GST registration, tax invoices and the treatment of sales to overseas customers, which Chapter 7 refers readers to rather than summarising in detail.
  • Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Federal Court finds Valve made misleading representations about consumer guarantees (2016). Source for the point in Chapter 8 that computer software is treated as goods under the Australian Consumer Law, including when it is licensed.
  • Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Consumer rights and guarantees: who is protected (current web page). Source for the consumer guarantees applying to purchases of A$100,000 or less (since 1 July 2021), including many business-to-business purchases, and the exclusion for goods bought for resupply.
  • Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Businesses urged to remove unfair contract terms ahead of law changes (2023). Source for the prohibition on unfair terms in standard form contracts with consumers and small businesses from 9 November 2023 and the penalties that now apply. The small-business definition (fewer than 100 employees or turnover under A$10 million) is as reported in government and legal summaries.
  • Business Victoria, Victorian Government. 4 intellectual property considerations for software ownership (current web page). Background for Chapter 2: employers generally own software written by employees in the course of employment, while contractors generally keep copyright unless it is assigned in writing.
  • Tom Preston-Werner. Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 (2013). Reference for the version numbering discussed in Chapter 4.

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