SmartStruct shipped 3x faster, so their team stayed on the product they sell.
SmartStruct is a construction management platform. Their customers work with PDFs and DWG drawings every day, so the product needed real drawing capabilities. Rather than build a canvas from scratch, they embedded the Rasterex SDK and kept their roadmap on what their customers actually buy them for.
Build a drawing engine from scratch, or focus on the real product?
Their users need measurement, markup, comparison and takeoff on real drawings. The classic dilemma: spend 18+ months building a canvas in-house, or stitch in a third-party SaaS that breaks the product feel and the pricing model. Neither was acceptable.
- 12 to 24 months of dedicated rendering and CAD engineering
- Per-user SaaS fees that did not match their commercial model
- Customer drawings sent through someone else's infrastructure
- An iframe experience that would never feel like their product
A third path: embed a proven SDK, own the experience.
SmartStruct integrated the Rasterex SDK directly into their platform. Not an iframe. Not a white-labelled SaaS. The actual rendering engine and APIs running inside their app, hooked into their auth, their data and their UI.
DWG, DXF and PDF rendered in the browser, self-hosted, with no file uploads to a third party.
Measurement, annotation, comparison, takeoff, redlining and exports. Compose what fits, skip the rest.
Wire the canvas into their auth, data model and UI. No iframe lock-in, no REST round-trips.
The SDK runs in their infrastructure, so drawings and customer data never leave their environment.
Before and after, for SmartStruct.
- Years of in-house engineering for a viewer they do not sell
- Fragmented stack — users bouncing between separate tools
- Drawing handling competing with their real roadmap
- Locked into per-user SaaS pricing
- Drawing engine integrated in weeks, not years
- One unified workspace for their customers
- Engineering focus stays on the product they sell
- Annual license, no per-user fees, full ownership
What it actually feels like.
For us, it is not about building everything ourselves. That would take too long. We partner with Rasterex for the core functionalities, so we can focus on making the best construction management software possible.
The canvas feels like a native part of our product. Our users do not know where SmartStruct ends and Rasterex begins, and that is exactly the point.
We get a real partner, not a vendor. When we need something specific for our workflow, we discuss it. That changes how fast we can move.
Three steps from "we need a canvas" to live.
The canvas runs inside the web app. Authenticate with the existing system, load drawings from their storage, render PDF and DWG in the browser.
Pick the building blocks: measurement, takeoff, markup, comparison. Style and trigger them through the JavaScript API to match the product.
Their branding, their UX, their pricing. The Rasterex SDK is invisible to the end user, so they only see the SmartStruct product.
If this sounds like your product, the SmartStruct playbook applies.
- You ship a vertical software product
- Your users work with drawings, but drawings are not your core product
- You would rather embed a proven engine than build one for 18 months
- You need to own the data, the hosting and the customer relationship
- Per-user SaaS pricing breaks your margin model