Free vs Paid Cut List Optimisers: What You Get
There are good free cut list optimisers. That is the honest starting point, and any tool vendor who tells you otherwise is selling. If all you need is a tidy layout for a bookcase on Saturday, free will do the job and do it well. The question worth answering is what changes when cutting sheets is how you earn a living.
Are free cut list optimisers any good?
Free cut list optimisers are genuinely good at the thing they do, which is packing rectangles onto boards. The core maths of sheet optimisation is well understood and widely implemented, so a free tool will usually get you a layout within a small margin of a paid one on the same cut list. Anyone claiming their optimiser saves dramatically more board than everyone else’s should be asked for an apples-to-apples comparison, because the honest answer across mature tools is that the layouts land close together.
What free tools typically limit is not the quality of the layout but how much you can do with it: how many calculations you run, how many projects you save, and what you can export. Those limits are set per tool and change often, so check the current terms of whichever you are using rather than trusting a blog post, this one included.
What does paying for a cut list optimiser actually buy?
Paying buys the business layer around the layout, not a better layout. The optimisation is table stakes. What costs money to build and maintain is everything that turns a cutting plan into a job: quoting with your prices and markup, tracking what board you own, keeping offcuts as usable stock, saving projects you can return to, and producing something you can hand a customer.
That is the split worth understanding before you spend anything. If your bottleneck is “I need a layout”, free solves it. If your bottleneck is “I spent Sunday evening working out what to charge, and I bought board I already had in the rack”, a layout does not solve that, however good it is. The money is for the hours around the cut, which is also where the hours actually go.
When is a free optimiser enough?
A free optimiser is enough when the cut list is the whole problem. Hobbyists, weekend projects, one-off builds and anyone cutting occasionally get everything they need from a free tool, and there is no sense paying for inventory tracking when your inventory is the sheet in the back of the car. The same goes for a pro trying a tool out: run a real job through the free tier before you spend anything, because a layout on your own cut list tells you more than any feature list.
Free stops making sense at the point where the admin around the job costs more than the job’s cutting. That is usually when you are quoting regularly, holding stock across jobs, and reusing offcuts often enough that forgetting them costs real money.
What does Cutzilla’s free tier include?
Cutzilla’s free tier is $0 and includes 5 optimisations a day, 2 projects and 2 materials, with both cutting strategies, grain direction, multi-sheet layouts and offcut tracking. Exports are watermarked. It is a real tier rather than a trial, so a hobbyist can stay on it indefinitely, and a professional can put an actual job through it before deciding anything.
Beyond that sit two paid tiers. Maker, at $15 a month, drops the watermark and the limits: unlimited projects, materials and optimisations, plus SVG, CSV and G-code exports and printable QR labels. Pro, at $29 a month, is where the quoting, branded exports and inventory tracking live. Every new account gets 14 days of Pro automatically, no card required. The pricing page breaks down what is in each tier, and the comparison table sets Cutzilla against other cutting tools without pretending the differences are bigger than they are.
How should you choose?
Run your own cut list through two or three tools and see which one fits how you work. Feature tables are written by the people selling the software, mine included, so the only test that means anything is a real job on your own parts with your own sheet sizes and your own kerf. Judge the layout, then judge everything you would have to do next, because that second part is what you are choosing between once the layouts come out level.
Try it free. 5 optimisations a day, $0, no card. Put a real job through the cut list optimiser and judge it on your own parts. Start free.