Most people who get sent a DWG are not drafters. They are contractors, facilities managers, shop owners, project managers — people who need to look at a drawing, print it, mark it up, and send it back. CADdillo exists for them.
CADdillo was built to solve a problem its author kept hitting in the course of other work: a vendor sends a facility layout as a DWG, and opening it means either buying an AutoCAD licence, hunting for a sketchy free viewer, or emailing back to ask for a PDF and waiting two days.
The third option is the most common one, and it is absurd. The drawing already exists. The conversion is a solved problem. The only thing standing in the way is that the tools which do it well are priced for full-time drafters — AutoCAD runs about $2,030 a year, AutoCAD LT about $500 — and the ones priced for everyone else are usually trying to do something else with your file.
So the converter is free and it always will be. Not free-for-now, not free-until-we-raise. The conversion tool is the thing that should exist in the world regardless of whether this becomes a business.
DWG r11 through r2018, plus DXF. Out comes PDF, DXF, PNG or SVG. The PDF is a proper plot — black on white with real lineweights — not a screenshot of a dark CAD window.
Doors, ADA fixtures, MEP piping with every orientation, P&ID symbols, site furniture. Drawn in-house and dimensioned, not scraped. Other tools sell these as $99 symbol packs; here they ship in every tier including the free one.
Dillo Bot drafts what you describe, renders the result, looks at it, and corrects itself when it is wrong. It caught its own floating door in testing and moved it. That self-check loop is the part that makes AI drafting usable.
The viewer parses DXF entirely in your browser — those files are never uploaded anywhere. Conversion does run server-side, because reading binary DWG requires it, and those uploads are deleted the moment the response is sent.
Being straight about this matters more than a marketing page usually allows. CADdillo is young — the editor shipped in July 2026 and is in open beta. Text rendering in the viewer is approximate. Hatches draw as outlines. DWG output is written as r2000, which every AutoCAD opens, but it is not a modern r2018 write. Very large drawings are better viewed than converted.
If you need a mature, all-cases-covered drafting package for full-time professional work, AutoCAD LT is still the more complete tool and we say so on the comparison page. If you need to open the file in your inbox and get on with your day, this is faster, cheaper and less annoying.
CADdillo is a product of Quantum Armadillo, LLC, a small independent company. There is no venture funding behind it, no growth team, and no plans to sell your drawings to anyone — there is no data business here because the files are deleted after conversion.
The paid tier exists to pay for servers and AI inference, which cost real money per drawing. Everything that does not have a marginal cost — the converter, the viewer, the block library — stays free because there is no good reason to charge for it.
Bug reports, drawings that convert badly, and "why doesn't it do X" are all genuinely welcome — especially files that fail, since those are the fastest way to make the converter better. Get in touch.
