Built in a shop. Maintained on purpose.
I'm Kyle Keck. I run a fabrication shop, I bid these jobs, and I built StoneNest because I needed it — not adapted from metal-shop or laser-cutting nesting software.
Why I built this
The honest reason isn't a job that blew up. It's the quieter thing: when you aren't certain of your slab count, you pad it. You add buffer slabs so you can't get burned, and that padding goes straight into the number you hand the GC. Sometimes you don't win the work, and you never find out the buffer is why.
When we did win, we'd finish with a couple of slabs left over. They sit in the rack for years, bought for one job in one material, with nothing else to do with them.
The counting itself was worse. I've laid units out by hand and multiplied them across the building. I've searched the internet for a better way. For a while we shipped the whole package off to a firm overseas that did our slab counts for us — and every time the GC changed something, we sent it back, waited, and paid again. On a multifamily job the drawings change five or ten times before anyone breaks ground. The material switches. The distributor gets jumbo slabs and you want to re-bid on the bigger size. The tops grow two inches. Every one of those barely touches a unit drawing, and every one of them means the slab count is wrong again.
StoneNest is what I wanted on those nights: a conservative, validated slab count from the DXFs I already have, in a form I can put in a bid — today, and again tomorrow when it changes.
— Kyle Keck, founder
It keeps working even if we don't.
The tool you build bids on can't depend on someone else's servers, funding, or good week. StoneNest is built so that once it's on your PC, it stays yours to run — no matter what happens on our end.
No kill switch
StoneNest runs on your machine, not ours. Your nesting never depends on our servers having a good day. If you ever cancel, the app keeps working in the free Estimator Mode — and your bids stay on your PC, still yours.
Your rate never goes up
Early Adopter Seat pricing is locked for life while you stay subscribed. The rate you start at is the rate you keep — not a “welcome” rate that quietly climbs.
Maintained in the open — with patch notes
Every release ships with published patch notes, so you can see exactly what changed and why, plus a checksum to confirm the exact file you're running. Signed installers are on the way. When something's not ready yet, this site says so plainly instead of glossing over it.
Made by someone who bids these jobs
I build and maintain StoneNest, and I use it on my own multifamily bids. The person fixing it is the person relying on it, so it gets fixed for the way shops actually quote — not for the way software imagines they do.
Complementary to your existing tools
If your shop already does photo-matched slab layout, StoneNest isn't trying to replace that step. It's built for the step before it: a fast, conservative slab count you can put in a bid before you've committed the time to a full photo-layout. Slab count before the sale, photo-matched layout after you've won the job.
Where this is headed
The beta opens with the core promise — a validated slab count from your unit DXFs, fast. From there, StoneNest grows the way a shop tool should: signed installers, patch notes with every release, and the features working fabricators actually ask for, in the order they ask for them. The first 25 founding shops aren't just early customers — they're the ones steering that list.
Try it on your next bid
Start with the 7-day free trial — no card required — and see for yourself before anyone asks you to pay.