What it is
PanelOrca is a SketchUp extension with a small companion cloud. You design furniture inside SketchUp the way you already do — except your boxes, panels, and hardware know about each other. Resize a cabinet and the drawers, doors, and connectors regenerate themselves. Hit export and you get a clean bill of materials, edge-banding plan, and the machine code for whatever CNC you're sending it to.
Who it's for
- Cabinet makers who already know SketchUp and don't want to learn another CAD
- Small and mid-sized shops that need real production output, not just pretty renders
- Designers and architects who want to hand specs to a workshop without translation pain
What it's not
- A general-purpose 3D modeller — SketchUp already does that, and we sit on top of it
- An enterprise ERP — we focus on the design-to-CNC path, not accounting or HR
- A black box — your model lives in SketchUp, your data is yours to export
How it got here
PanelOrca started as a private tool to remove the busywork between designing a cabinet in SketchUp and getting it cut. Every shortcut that turned out to be useful was kept. Every time the same workflow needed to repeat — drilling for connectors, banding edges, generating labels, nesting parts — we automated it. The result is a single extension that grew up around a real shop's daily reality.
We're now opening it up to other woodworkers. The free tier is what most personal users will ever need; paid tiers and the local agent program are on the way, but the product came first.
Where we're going
The next 3 months are about getting PanelOrca into the hands of as many woodworkers as possible — for free — and listening hard. The features we ship after that will be the ones you tell us matter, not the ones a roadmap meeting decides.
Get in touch
Questions, ideas, war stories from your shop — we read every email. hello@panelorca.com.