AXO. Tools for architectural practice.
We build the tools we need to run a better practice. Drafting, document workspaces, materials research, quality checking, teaching. Where the available software did not fit how we work, we made our own. The family is called AXO. Everything here started as a real problem inside a working practice, and everything is tested on our own projects first.
Some of it we share freely. Some of it we build, adapted, for other practices. All of it runs in your browser and keeps your files on your machine.
Free tools
Free to use, no accounts, no uploads. Your files never leave your browser.
AXO Archkit
liveA multi-mode workspace for architectural PDFs. Tile and print large drawings, mark up and annotate, build issue schedules and sheet binders, author project briefs, compare revisions, present drawing sets, and mark student work against rubrics. Built for practitioners, students, and educators. Local-only by design, which means student work and project documents stay exactly where they should: with you.
AXO Draft
in developmentBrowser-based 2D drafting. Local-first, offline-capable, no subscription. In development and tested daily inside CLAD.
Custom tools for AEC practices
If your practice has a problem no off-the-shelf software solves, we take on a small number of custom builds each year: dashboards, automations, checking tools, document workflows, and interfaces designed to your brief.
This is consultancy grounded in practice, not software sold from outside it. Before founding CLAD, Carey worked as a Project Architect at one of Melbourne's established multi-residential practices delivering complex social and multi-residential housing, managed operations in a small Melbourne studio, and spent over a decade producing technical documentation for education, healthcare, and civic projects across Western Australia. That range, from a two-person studio to large-practice delivery, from drawing board to practice operations, is why AXO tools fit the way architects actually work.
We scope, quote, and build the way we run buildings: brief first, fixed stages, no surprises. Work is quoted by proposal.
How an engagement runs
- Listen. Tell us what is slow, repetitive, or error-prone in your practice.
- Scope. We come back with a fixed proposal: what we will build, what it costs, what it needs from you.
- Build. Staged delivery. You test as we go.
- Handover. Documentation, training, and an optional support arrangement.
Sometimes the answer is smaller. If you are not sure whether your problem is a tool problem, ask anyway. Sometimes the answer is a template, sometimes a spreadsheet, sometimes nothing at all. We will tell you which.
Who this is for
Most practice software is built for firms of fifty. Most Australian practices are one to five people. AXO exists for the gap: tools that take hours off the week of a small practice, built inside one.
For students and educators, the free tools are yours without condition. They are local-only, which means no student work or personal data ever leaves the browser.
For our clients: this page is part of how we work. The same care that goes into checking a drawing set goes into your project.
Start with the free tools.
Open Archkit, use it on a real project, and see whether the way we think matches the way you work. When you want more, we are one email away.