Frequently asked questions

Yes — it’s free to use right now, with no ads and no affiliate links. Pricing isn’t decided yet, so we’re not promising it stays free forever; if that ever changes, it won’t be a surprise sprung on you.

No — you can browse, search, and read every plan (including the full cut list and steps) without signing in. An account, with email or Google, unlocks the parts that are personal to you: saving plans, likes, reviews and build photos, your shopping list, and downloading your library for offline use.

Because a precise dollar figure would be a number we’d only be pretending to know. Lumber prices swing with your region, the species, and the season, so a “$187.50” on a plan would be wrong for most people most of the time. A band — from $ to $$$$$ — tells you the decision-relevant thing (is this a cheap project or not?) without the false precision.

Yes. Woodworking Plan installs to your phone or desktop like an app and works offline. Any plan you’ve opened is cached for offline reading, and you can explicitly download your saved library — plans, their print views, and your shopping list — for a trip to the workshop or the hardware store. Every plan also has a clean print / “Save as PDF” view built for paper.

Open a plan and choose Add to shopping list — it’s a separate, deliberate action from saving, so your list stays what you’re actually buying for, not everything you’ve ever bookmarked. You can view it as one combined, buyable list (quantities merged, grouped by unit) or broken down by plan. Identical items are combined only when they’re truly identical — two different screw sizes are never merged into one confident, wrong quantity.

Every plan is hand-authored with a complete cut list in tape-measure fractions (13/16″, not 0.8125″). That said, wood moves, stock varies, and a mistake in your shop is yours to eat — so measure your own material, dry-fit before glue, and treat the plan as a well-specified starting point, not gospel. Follow the safety guidance for your tools; some of these projects involve saws and sharp edges.

Not yet. Community-submitted plans are something we may add later, but publishing build instructions under the site’s name carries real responsibility, so it isn’t open until it can be done carefully. For now the catalog is curated.

Accounts are handled by our sign-in provider; we store what the features need — which plans you saved and liked, your reviews, your shopping list. Build photos you upload are re-encoded and have their location (GPS) data stripped before they’re stored, so a phone photo of your workbench never publishes your home address. You can delete your reviews and photos, and deleting your account removes your data.