Answers, Straight.

CoLateral is a desktop workspace built on an infinite canvas. You drop things onto it and arrange them the way you would arrange paper on a desk: calculation tools, spreadsheets, schedules and calendars, notes, drawings and PDFs, a terminal, and AI agents that can read the project around them. Nothing on the canvas is tied to one discipline, and you can add a tool that does not exist yet by describing what it should calculate and letting the workspace build it.

A seat ships with a starting set of tools - project intake, drawing and PDF work, sheet indexing, Canadian climatic data - and with the part that matters more: you can describe a calculation, a checker or a report and have it built on the canvas. Prebuilt suites for a particular discipline are expansion packs, and none of them is available or for sale. The demos page lists what a seat actually gives you.

A pack would be one discipline's prebuilt tool suite, layered on a seat: tools someone has already built, checked and documented for a particular kind of engineering, so you are not starting from an empty canvas. None of them exists as a product yet. Structural, mechanical and electrical are all named on the packs page so you can see where this goes, and every one of them carries no price and no button. A seat is the only thing CoLateral sells.

All of them, because the workspace is discipline-neutral: the canvas, the AI agents, the terminal, the spreadsheets, schedules, notes and document handling carry no assumptions about what you are designing. You bring your own project files and build the calculations you need on top of them.

The honest limit is that you do not get a ready-made suite for your discipline. No expansion pack exists yet, for any discipline, so what a seat gives everyone is the same workspace and the same ability to build in it.

Yes. Describe the calculation you want in plain language: the inputs, the method or clause it follows, what it should report. The agent builds it as a tool on your canvas, you check the arithmetic against a worked example you already trust, and it stays in your workspace to reuse on the next project. It is your own credentials doing the work, so the model bill is yours and the review is yours too. Treat a tool you built the same way you treat one that shipped in a pack: verify it before it touches a real design.

Nothing. CoLateral is in closed beta, and an approved tester gets the whole workspace free for 14 days with nothing held back. Apply on the beta page, and a licence key arrives by email. There is no payment and no plan starts when the 14 days are up.

Once the beta ends, a seat is CA$99 / month or CA$990 / year, and firms pay CA$800 / seat / year on a 3-seat minimum. That is the entire price list - no expansion pack is on sale, so there is nothing to add on top. The pricing page has the full breakdown.

64-bit Windows 10 or 11, macOS 12 or newer on Apple Silicon or Intel, and 64-bit Linux as an AppImage or a .deb. There is no mobile or browser version. The download page says which installers are actually published; a platform shows a status instead of a button until its build ships.

A licence key arrives by email once your application is approved. On first run the app shows an activation form and will not go further without a valid key. First activation needs the internet so the key can be checked; after that the app runs offline for 30 days and re-checks quietly. A beta key runs 14 days; after that the AI agent panel and the terminal stop, while the calculators, the canvas, the drawing tools and export keep working, with your files still on your disk.

Mostly. The workspace, your saved project data and the calculation tools all run on your machine. Four things still need a connection: sign-in, licence activation, the climatic tools' basemap, and AI calls to your provider.

Yes, for the AI features. CoLateral supplies no model credits, on any plan or during the beta. The agent panel and terminal run on your own Claude Code or Codex CLI login, or your own Anthropic API key, and that usage is billed to you by the provider. Without one, the calculators, canvas and drawing tools still work and the agent panel does not.

Yes. The agent terminal needs Node.js on your PATH. Without it the terminal does nothing and there is no fallback, though the app still opens. Nothing else in the workspace depends on it.

By hand. Automatic updates are not enabled. New builds are announced by email; go to the download page and install the current one over your existing copy. Your saved project data is separate from the installer, but back a project up first anyway.

Every card on the canvas shares one project context, so a value you establish once flows to the tool that consumes it. Sketch something out, route it to the tool you built for that check, and the handoff carries the inputs across: the tool prefills them, lists exactly what was applied, and writes the result back to where it came from. The sketch and the tool never show two different sets of numbers.

The same routing works between any two cards that agree on what they are passing, including tools you built yourself. Imported values are starting inputs only - the engineer verifies everything.

Today: IFC and DXF import and export for Revit and CAD coordination, and PDF ingestion for drawing sets. Reference data a shipped tool needs - Canadian climatic values by site, for instance - is embedded in the tool itself, so no external library or subscription is needed to run it.

Connectors to analysis packages (ETABS, SAP2000, RAM, RISA), BIM platforms (Revit, Tekla), and project management tools (Procore, Bluebeam) are planned. The demos page shows the capabilities that are in the current catalogue without presenting those planned connectors as available.

The repeatable work around the engineering, not the judgment itself: reading through a document set, indexing a drawing set, pulling site data, first-pass checks you have defined yourself, and drafting the correspondence around a project - RFI responses, review comments, field notes and calculation summaries. Every draft arrives as something to review, not a finished deliverable.

The calculators are screening and design aids, not analysis software. There is no CAD kernel and no finite element solver underneath any of this, and the visual analyzers draw indicative diagrams rather than design-adequate ones. CoLateral does not certify or stamp work and does not replace independent verification against the governing code. Treat every output as a faster starting point, bounded by the assumptions you gave it.

You do. CoLateral prepares drafts and organises the project; judgment and accountability stay with the responsible engineer. Generated calculation summaries show their inputs, assumptions, method, governing checks and limits precisely so they can be checked. Nothing should leave your office without engineer review and sign-off.

Project data stays on your machine, and every draft records which files it referenced and what it assumed. The AI runs on guardrails rather than open-ended autonomy: each agent declares which tools it may call, no agent grants itself more, outputs are source-backed and carry a confidence value, and anything high-stakes goes through a human-review checkpoint first.

Engineers of any discipline who want one workspace for the calculations, the paperwork and the project, and who would rather build the tools they are missing than wait for someone to ship them. The canvas, the agents, the terminal, the sheets and notes carry no discipline assumptions.

In practice that means solo practitioners and small to mid-size firms carrying correspondence, drawing review and site observations alongside their calculation work, in whatever discipline they practise. There is no prebuilt suite for any of them, which is why the ability to build a tool by describing it is the part worth judging the product on.