Introducing the future of electronic product design. And it’s free.

I have some very exciting news: We’ve been acquired by Altium, a leading provider of design software for the electronics industry.

Our mission at Upverter from the very start has been to make hardware and product design approachable for everyone: to make hardware less hard. To empower engineers, makers, hobbyists and students by equipping them with world-class technology through an intuitive user experience. We believe the best design tools fade into the background, freeing designers to be truly creative. And over the past seven years we’ve gotten really close to realizing this vision. We’ve built the world’s most sophisticated cloud-based, collaborative hardware design tool. We’ve helped more than 45,000 people design more than 80 thousand devices.

But we’re not even close to finished yet.

Altium shares our vision for a powerful, collaborative new style of product design software. Free, but powerful enough to design a real product, accessible-to-all, cloud-based and collaborative, and maybe, most importantly, incredibly intuitive, helpful even, and easy-to-use. If the world is going to design millions of new IOT devices over the next decade then it needs a new style of design software. These devices won’t come from the CAD world. Their tools are unapproachable, they feel old, and they were made for a different reason – made for professional, trained, and experienced electrical engineers. These devices need a different approach – they need product design software made for everyone else. A new style of design software made for the new generation. Made for the masses.

You may have noticed that today we removed our paid professional account tier. From now on the best, most feature-full, most powerful version of Upverter will be our only version. It will always be free to use, for everyone, from anywhere. Regardless of whether you’re a professional electrical engineer, a maker, a student, a hobbyist or anyone else, you can now design your product, your hardware, your IOT device, your PCB – completely for free using Upverter. Unfettered access for all.

I want to emphasize that we aren’t making Upverter free for the sake of free, and we aren’t making Upverter free because Altium doesn’t care about it. It’s exactly the the opposite. We believe that this new style of design platform is so valuable, and so necessary, that making it anything other than free would hurt the world, limit our growth, and prevent our vision from being realized. Between Octopart, which provides free electronic component search and discovery (joined Altium in 2015) and our experiments with EEConcierge, which provides paid design services on-demand, inside your design tool (think of it as in-app purchases), we have come to the conclusion that indirect monetization is the future. We think it’s the right way to both make money, and help designers produce products – without getting in their way or limiting them – and we’re betting on it going forward.

It gets better.

The team that built Upverter: Steve, Mike, Francesca, Carmen, Ryan, Patryk, Yashwanth and me – the entire team – have joined Altium, and we’re continuing to work on Upverter in the hopes of making it so much better. We’re going to be growing our team too, investing even more into making Upverter both incredibly powerful, and also incredibly easy to use. We have a grand vision of making it possible for our users to design more than just a PCB – a complete product: system design, schematic, PCB, enclosure, mechanical, firmware, software, BOM, manufacturing, etc, etc. Soup to nuts. All through Upverter. All collaborative. All easy to use. Unified product design.

We’re joining forces with Altium because we think we can move faster, innovate faster, and grow faster together than we could apart. The most important thing is a world filled with thousands, and thousands of new IOT devices and products – and that you bring your product to life. We’re partnering with Altium because it enables us, to enable you, to make that world a reality – better than we ever could on our own.

Thanks for all of your support over the years. Your feedback, your trust, your amazing projects, and your love fuelled us. We got here together – and we’re so deeply grateful for that. I’m excited to open this new chapter with you – we’re going to do so many remarkable things together over the next few years.