About STEPFILE.com

Where This Came From

STEPFILE.com was born on the shop floor at Texas Metal Works in Conroe, Texas, where we build welding tables and welding booths. Our engineers have designed hundreds of parts, and everyone in the shop needs to see them. The laser team pulls up DXF files. The press brake team needs bend drawings. The fab team needs assemblies. And all of them work better from a 3D model, because a model brings a flat drawing to life when you don’t yet know what you’re building.

Partners also rely on us as an outsourced manufacturer, which means sending models back and forth for approval. So we built our own tool: open the file, spin it, measure it, ask a question right on the part, done. It quickly became the way our whole shop talks about parts.

From Viewer to Modeler

It started as a viewer. It didn’t stay one. Once we could look at a part, we wanted to change it. Then we wanted to build new ones from scratch, put them together, and send the result to the shop. So we kept building.

Today STEPFILE.com opens STEP, IGES, STL, OBJ, 3MF, glTF and DXF files, edits STEP models with a full feature history you can change at any step, builds assemblies with real mates, and saves your work as STEP, the format every other CAD program understands. A desktop add-in sends models straight from your CAD program, you can embed live 3D models on your own website, and you can connect the AI assistant you already use to find, organize and work on your models for you.

We share it with our customers, and with everyone else too, because if it saves us this much back-and-forth, it’ll do the same for every shop, buyer and builder dealing with the same headaches.

Who’s Behind It

STEPFILE.com is the brainchild of our founder, John Pozadzides, who has been building things for the web since its earliest days. He founded HTMLHelp.com and has kept it online and free for about 30 years. He’s a W3C CSS Hall of Fame inductee, co-founded Woopra, a real-time web analytics company, and hosted Geek Beat TV on Revision3. Today he runs Texas Metal Works, where he still designs, welds and builds.

That track record is the best promise we can make: when we say something stays free, it stays free.

No Giant Corporation. No Venture Capital. No Catch.

STEPFILE.com isn’t owned by some greedy massive corporation, and there’s not a blood-sucking venture capitalist in sight. It’s owned entirely by Texas Metal Works: hard-working fabricators just like you, who built something genuinely useful and shared it with the world.

Here’s the whole story on the money. Viewing, measuring and sharing are free, as in beer, and always will be. The paid plans are fairly priced, at a fraction of what comparable CAD tools charge. Every dollar they bring in goes back into staff and development, because we have a long way to go and we intend to get there by making STEPFILE.com better, not by squeezing the people who use it.

Your Files Stay Yours

Viewing happens locally in your own browser, so nothing is uploaded just to look at a file. Anything you choose to save or share can be deleted at any time. And because your work is saved as STEP, the open standard, you can take it to any other CAD program whenever you like. No proprietary format, no lock-in. Details are in our privacy policy.

Our Mission

STEPFILE.com exists to keep 3D design open. We build the best place to view, edit and share STEP files, and we’ll never hold your work hostage to do it.

That comes down to a few promises:

• Fair prices, always.
• No surprise renewals and no reinstatement fees.
• Viewing, measuring and sharing stay free.
• Your files are always yours, and getting them out is never paywalled.

Questions or ideas? We’d like to hear them: [email protected].