On a drawing set, the thirteenth issue is Revision M. M also happens to be the Roman numeral for one thousand — and this week, that coincidence caught up with us: we shipped the one-thousandth version of Doclio.
It landed without ceremony, somewhere between a fix to how multi-page drawing revisions are matched and a tidy-up of the support inbox. Which is fitting, because that is what a thousand versions actually looks like: not one big moment, but a long run of small ones.
Doclio went live in April. We thought this was a good excuse to look back at what has been built since, and to say thank you to the people who have been using it while we did.
The drawing set, online
The core has always been the drawing set. Upload a multi-page PDF and Doclio splits it into individual sheets, reading the drawing number and title off each one where there is a text layer. Revisions track themselves, and you can compare two on screen to see exactly what changed rather than squinting between two tabs.
Cross-references between sheets are detected and turned into live links, so a callout on a plan opens the detail it points to.
Over the past few months that set has gained a lot of small conveniences that came almost entirely from user requests: favourites, downloading a single sheet or a whole selection as one zip, downloading a superseded revision as easily as the current one, and — a fiddly one this — uploading a new revision from a multi-page file, where Doclio now asks which page is the drawing and shows you a preview so you pick the right sheet.
Take-offs that measure
In July the take-off tools changed in a way worth calling out. Areas are now measured, not estimated: the AI finds the region, and the app traces the drawing's own vector linework at the set scale and measures it, typically within about a percent on a vector drawing with the scale set. Openings are deducted automatically. Scans, which have no linework to trace, are still labelled estimates.
You can adjust any measured area and the totals recompute immediately, and export take-offs for one drawing or the whole project. Lengths are read from the drawing's own dimension callouts rather than traced, so check those with the measure tool before you rely on them.
You can also just ask. "You missed the right side of the south elevation" now sends the assistant back to that region rather than starting over.
Quality records that live with the drawings
Inspection and Test Plans arrived in June and have been steadily built out since: a per-project register with groups, sections and tasks, a sign-off matrix across the responsible parties, hold and witness points, per-row photo evidence and reusable digital signatures. Lock and approve a plan and it stops drifting. The assistant will draft a first-cut ITP from your project documents, which you review and refine — a starting point, not a rubber stamp.
Reports and the mailbox
Reports render as clean tables with automatic subtotals and totals, and any row jumps straight to its drawing. Share one by link and the recipient needs no account.
The project mailbox has had the most steady attention of anything this year. Threads now have a Files tab with every attachment in one place, tick boxes to grab just the ones you want, and a download-all-as-zip. Formatting survives the round trip in both directions — bold, lists and links you write reach the recipient's inbox intact, and formatting in their reply is kept too, including answers typed inline. Replies go out the moment you hit send instead of a minute or two later. And people you share a thread with can do all of it from the emailed link, without signing in.
The unglamorous half
A fair share of those thousand versions will never show up in a feature list, and we think that is worth saying out loud.
There have been security reviews that closed real gaps before anyone hit them. There is a warning when you are approaching your storage limit, and a clear message with a way to add capacity when an upload will not fit, instead of a failure you have to decode. Asking to delete your account now schedules it thirty days out and requires a code emailed to you, so nobody can wipe an account just by getting at an open laptop.
And a long tail of fixes for things that were simply wrong. The assistant used to report a drawing as corrupted when the sheet just had no readable text layer. That sort of thing.
What has not changed
Every plan still includes unlimited users and unlimited viewers. Your subcontractors, consultants and clients cost nothing to add, which is the only way a single source of truth actually works — per-seat pricing quietly encourages you to leave people out, and then the drawing set is not the source of truth any more.
Doclio still runs in any browser on desktop, tablet and phone with nothing to install. Drawings you have opened stay readable without a connection, though offline is read-only — changes are not queued while you are disconnected, and we would rather say so than let you find out on site.
And the focus has not moved. Doclio is for drawings, quality records, approvals, reporting and project correspondence — the document and quality side of a job, done properly, rather than a little of everything.
Thank you
Most of the thousand exist because somebody told us something was awkward. The multi-page revision picker, the zip downloads, the formatting that kept getting mangled in email replies, the takeoff that needed correcting rather than redoing — none of those came from a roadmap. They came from people who took the time to write in when something got in their way, often about a detail small enough that it would have been easier to just work around it.
Thank you for that. It is genuinely the most useful thing you can send us, and it is why the next thousand will be worth more than the first.
If something is annoying you right now, tell us. We read all of it.