Sawgrid

Support

One person builds Sawgrid and the same person answers the mail. No ticket system, no chatbot, no queue you have to talk your way out of.

A cutting plan looks wrong

This is the report that matters most, so it gets the most detail. Sawgrid is deterministic by design, which has a very practical consequence for support.

Send the project file and the exact plan reproduces here. Every heuristic in the optimizer is deterministic and the refinement pass runs from a fixed seed, never from the clock. The same project always produces the same plan on any device. So a project export is not a hint about your problem, it is your problem, exactly.

What to send

Subject: Sawgrid, wrong plan

App version and build:   Settings, About, tap to copy
iOS version:             Settings, General, About
iPhone model:
Attached:                the exported project file

What I expected:
What Sawgrid produced:
Which part or sheet is affected:

Export the project from the project screen, share sheet, "Export project". The file contains your parts, your stock and your settings. It contains no personal data beyond whatever you typed into the part names, and it is deleted once the case is closed.

Three things worth checking first

  1. Grain locks. A part forced lengthwise cannot be rotated, so it can look like the optimizer "missed" an obvious spot when in fact it was forbidden from using it. Set that one part to free rotation and solve again to see the difference.
  2. Minimum offcut width. A leftover narrower than your minimum is counted as waste rather than as stock. Raising that setting makes utilization look worse on paper and makes the plan more producible. Lowering it does the opposite.
  3. Edge trim. Trim is taken off all four sides of every stock item before anything is placed. If a part is a few millimeters too big to fit and you cannot see why, this is usually why.

Questions that come up

I paid, but the paid features are still locked

Open Settings inside Sawgrid and use "Restore purchases". Purchases are tied to the Apple Account that made them, so make sure the device is signed in to that same account, in iOS Settings at the very top of the list.

If the restore still fails, send the date of the purchase and the last four characters of the Apple receipt or order number. Do not send a full receipt, a screenshot of the confirmation email with the price and card details blacked out is plenty.

Sawgrid says a part does not fit and refuses to give me a plan

That is deliberate, and the blocking report names the part, its size and the stock item it was measured against. It is there because the alternative, a plan that quietly leaves a part out, sends people to the merchant with the wrong quantity and they discover it at the saw.

Work through it in this order: is the part actually larger than the stock minus edge trim on all four sides? Is grain forcing an orientation in which it cannot fit? Is the stock quantity for that material greater than zero? Is the part assigned to the material you think it is?

Utilization is lower than I expected

Almost always one of four settings: grain locks that prevent rotation, a large kerf, a generous edge trim, or a high minimum offcut width that turns usable strips into waste. Change one at a time and resolve. Because the solver is deterministic, the comparison is meaningful, the difference you see is caused by the thing you changed and by nothing else.

The other common cause is a part list where a single awkward part is just wide enough to spoil the strip. The blocking report and the balance will not tell you that, but flipping that one part to free rotation usually will.

The PDF comes out empty, clipped or in the wrong place

Solve the project first. An unsolved project has nothing to draw, so the export is refused rather than blank. Then use the share sheet from the plan screen and pick Print, Save to Files or AirDrop.

Sawgrid draws to the paper size your printer reports, and falls back to A4. If a plan comes out clipped on a specific printer, send the printer model and the PDF and it will get fixed.

A dimension shows a value I did not type

Sawgrid stores every length as a whole number of tenths of a millimeter, so nothing drifts and nothing rounds twice. What you see is the display of an exact stored value in the unit you are currently showing. A part entered as 3/4" is stored as exactly 190 tenths of a millimeter and will read 19.0 mm in metric.

If a value genuinely differs from what you typed, that is a parser bug and it is worth reporting. Send the exact string you typed, character for character, including any space or quote mark.

Does Sawgrid show ads or track me?

No. This version contains no advertising, no analytics and no tracking software, so there is no consent dialog and nothing you have to switch off. Sawgrid never asks for tracking permission and never reads the advertising identifier. The full picture is in the privacy policy.

How do I move my projects to a new iPhone?

An encrypted iOS device backup or a direct device to device transfer carries the app container across, projects included. If you would rather move a single project, export it from the project screen and open the file on the new phone.

There is no cloud sync, because there is no server. That is the trade for having no account and nothing of yours leaving the device.

Can I use Sawgrid in a commercial workshop?

Yes. The licence covers professional use. The verification duty in the terms of use applies exactly the same way, and it matters more, not less, when the material is billable.

Reporting any other bug

Same idea, less ceremony. What helps most is the sequence of taps that produces the problem, because anything reproducible gets fixed quickly and anything that only happened once is very hard to chase.

Subject: Sawgrid, bug

App version and build:
iOS version:
iPhone model:

Steps:  1.
        2.
        3.
Expected:
Actually happened:
Happens every time / happened once:

Screenshots and screen recordings are welcome. If the app crashed, and you have analytics sharing switched on in iOS Settings, the crash usually arrives on this end within a day or two anyway, but a note telling us what you were doing at the time turns an anonymous stack trace into a fixable bug.

Feature requests

Very welcome, with one request in return: describe the job, not the feature. "I need to cut mitred frames and the parts list cannot express the angle" is far more useful than "please add angles", because the first one can be solved in several ways and the second one only in the way you already imagined.

Requests that come with a real project attached go to the top of the list, because they can be tested against something true rather than something invented.

Privacy requests

Access, correction, deletion and objection all go to the same address. Because Sawgrid has no account and no server, there is normally nothing stored about you at all, and that will be the honest answer to most access requests. The full picture is in the privacy policy.

Security reports

If you have found a security problem, please write privately first rather than publishing it, and give a reasonable window for a fix. Reports are taken seriously and answered by a person, not by a form.

Who you are writing to

Levin David Schwab
Paulinenstrasse 1/2
71263 Weil der Stadt
Germany
levin.schwab@gmx.de