Included
What works today
The project canvas, roughly 70 calculators and viewers across steel, concrete, wood, masonry and foundations, drawing and PDF intake, and saved designs. Project data stays on your machine.
Closed beta
What the beta is, and what it is not.
An invited group testing a local-first structural engineering workspace on Windows. Free, with direct access to the person building it. Read what does not work yet before you install.
Windows 10/11 onlyFree during betaLicence key required
Platform
Windows only
64-bit Windows 10 or 11. macOS and Linux are not packaged, and there is no date for either. If you want one of them, say so in your application and it gets counted.
First run
The installer may be unsigned
Windows will show "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info, then Run anyway. That warning is what an unsigned build looks like, not a sign that something is wrong with the download.
Licence
Activation needs the internet once
Paste the licence key from your approval email on first run. After that the app works offline for 30 days and re-checks quietly in the background.
Licence
A seat runs 14 days
The expiry is signed into the key, so it cannot be extended in place. When it lapses the app drops to read-only rather than locking you out: your files stay yours and stay on your disk. We will tell you before the date, and say plainly whether the beta is being extended.
AI
AI needs your own credentials
The agent panel runs on your Claude Code or Codex CLI login, or an Anthropic API key you enter yourself. CoLateral supplies no model credits. Without one, the calculators, canvas and drawing tools all still work.
Requirements
The agent terminal needs Node.js
Node.js on your PATH is required for the terminal only. The engineering tools do not need it. Without it the terminal silently does nothing, and on Windows there is no fallback.
Updates
Updates are manual
Automatic updates are not wired to a button yet. New builds are announced by email and installed over your existing copy.
Offline
Some tools still reach the internet
The two climatic tools draw their basemap from a public tile service and show a notice when it is unavailable. Everything else in the suite runs from files that ship with the app.
Feedback
What we want from you
Which tool you reached for first, what you expected it to do, and where it did not match how you actually work. That is more useful than a list of bugs.
Bug reports
Reporting a problem
Include your Windows version, the CoLateral version from the About box, and the steps that led to it. Never include confidential client or project data in a report.
Privacy
Your data stays yours
The workspace is local-first and calculations stay on your machine. See the privacy policy for what is and is not collected.
Responsibility
Engineer review is still required
Every calculator is a design aid. CoLateral does not certify, stamp, or replace independent verification against the governing code, and no output should leave your office without engineer review and sign-off.