One Project, Six Free Tools: A Complete DSYNTEC Walkthrough
Tool lists tell you what software does. They don't tell you the thing that actually matters: how the outputs chain — whether the thing one tool produces is the thing the next one needs. So instead of a list, here's a project.
The project is deliberately ordinary: a three-storey mixed-use building — ground-floor retail, two floors of small offices — for a client who owns a shortlist of two candidate lots and a folder of ambitions. We'll run it from first conversation to construction tracking, using all six DSYNTEC tools in the order the work actually demands them. Everything below happens in a browser, free, with no accounts — and because every tool is local-first, the client's brief, the lot analysis, the pricing, and the model never touch a third-party server at any point in the chain.
1. AnchorMind — the brief, taken apart
The kickoff meeting produces the usual artifact: a two-page wish list, a budget said out loud but not written, and the sentence "we want it to feel premium but not expensive." Before anything gets sized, the brief gets exploded in AnchorMind: every claim its own node, the client's words preserved, branches for spaces, character, budget, site, and operations — then every node tagged fact, assumption, or question, with dependency arrows between requirements that constrain each other.
The map's yield on this project: the "premium" node connects to nothing measurable (question for the client), the retail tenant mix is an assumption wearing a fact's clothes, and the budget branch is nearly empty. Output passed forward: a written question list, and a confirmed requirements baseline once the answers land.
2. Site Feasibility Calculator — two lots enter, one leaves
Two candidate lots, one afternoon. For each, the boundary goes into the Site Feasibility Calculator along with the zone's setbacks, site-occupancy percentage, floor-area ratio, and height limit. Lot A: generous area, but the setbacks and a low height limit strand a third of its floor-area allowance — permission it can never use. Lot B: smaller, but the envelope reaches nearly all of its allowance, and the corner frontage suits ground-floor retail.
Fifteen minutes per lot, two PDF feasibility reports, and a recommendation the client can hold: Lot B, for reasons written down. Output passed forward: the buildable envelope — the ceiling the program must fit under.
The confirmed brief becomes a space program in SpaceFlow: retail units, office suites, cores, services, waste, parking — each space with a standards-anchored area, each relationship marked (retail wants the corner; offices want the quiet frontage; waste and loading stay off the retail face). The bubble diagram settles into the building's logic before any plan exists.
Then the two reconciliations that justify the whole exercise: net areas grossed up land at ~92% of Lot B's envelope — it fits, with breathing room — and gross area × a benchmark cost rate lands inside the (now written) budget. Both checks happen on bubbles, where changing them is free. Output passed forward: a client-signed program with areas, adjacencies, and totals.
4. Concept happens — then the BIM Model Viewer opens the results
The concept and developed design are the architect's and engineers' work, in whatever authoring tools they use — the suite doesn't pretend otherwise. Where it re-enters is at every exchange: the consultants issue IFC models, and the BIM Model Viewer is how the client, the project manager, and the site team open them without licences. The structural model gets the review treatment — tree walk for missing or homeless elements, section cuts through the critical bays, property sampling against the drawing marks — and one export arrives with a floating fragment and half-empty property sets, caught in ten minutes and sent back with a specific re-export request instead of a vague complaint. Output passed forward: reviewed, coordinated models the pricing can trust.
5. Simple QTO Tool — the price with an ancestry
Tender drawings land in the Simple QTO Tool: each sheet calibrated against a written dimension and verified against a second, then measured trade by trade — every quantity a visible markup tied to its sheet and revision. Rates attach, and the BOQ exports as PDF (the issued record) and CSV (into the estimator's own costing spreadsheet). Structured by level and zone — because that's how it will be claimed — the bill becomes the project's commercial backbone. Output passed forward: a priced, referenced BOQ whose every line can answer "measured from where?"
6. Taskboard — the build, visible
Construction starts, and the BOQ's zone-items become cards on Taskboard: Not Started → In Progress → Complete → Claimed → Paid, with the Gantt view showing the zones against the calendar. The board file lives in the project folder; a snapshot at every claim date builds a dated record of what was complete when. The client — who by now has opened the IFC models, signed the program, and holds the feasibility reports — watches progress on the same board the contractor runs. Output: a building, and a paper trail.
Pro tip: The chain's real product is that paper trail. Question list → feasibility PDFs → signed program → model review notes → referenced BOQ → dated board snapshots: six documents, each one tool's export, together forming a project record that answers almost any dispute with a dated file instead of a memory. Run the tools for the workflow; keep the exports for the protection.
What the chain proves
Ordinary project, zero licences, and no gap in the sequence where the work fell back into email-and-memory. That's the argument the suite makes as a whole: the connective tissue of a project — interrogating, screening, programming, reviewing, measuring, tracking — doesn't need installed software or subscriptions anymore, and it certainly doesn't need your project's information scattered across other people's servers. One browser. Six bookmarks. The files stay yours.
Explore all six tools → — free, no accounts, local-first, start anywhere in the chain.
Feasibility figures, cost benchmarks, and quantities in any screening workflow remain estimates until verified by licensed professionals. Design, engineering, and contractual acceptance are professional responsibilities this toolkit supports but never replaces.