Meet Kerf: a cut list optimizer built for the weekend shop

I built Kerf because every cut list optimizer I tried felt wrong for the way I actually work.

The professional tools — CutList Plus, SketchList, Cabinet Vision — are powerful but priced and designed for full-time shops running production runs. They assume you have a CNC, a panel saw, and a team. If you are one person with a table saw and a weekend, they are overkill in every direction.

The free web calculators go the other way. You paste a cut list into a form, get a static PNG back, and hope the algorithm made reasonable decisions. There is no unit for fractional inches. No way to carry the layout to the shop. No concept that your blade has width. And the second you close the tab, the work is gone.

In the middle is a gap. That gap is where most of the people cutting plywood actually live. Kerf lives there too.

What Kerf is

Kerf is a native iOS app that takes a list of stock sheets and cut pieces and produces a layout you can actually build. It lives in your pocket. You use it at the lumber yard, on the drive home, and at the saw.

It ships with three packing strategies, not one — because the right layout depends on whether you care about preserving offcuts, minimizing total sheets, or keeping every cut straight enough for a table saw. You pick the one that matches your shop.

It understands fractional inches. You type 24 1/2 or 2' 6 3/4 or 1/8, the way you would write it on a scrap of plywood. It also does metric for the rest of the world.

It accounts for your blade. That is why it is called Kerf. Every cut removes material — a typical table saw blade takes ⅛" — and the tools that ignore this produce drawer bottoms that come out short. Kerf does not ignore it.

It imports cut lists from places a cut list actually lives. Take a photo of a printed project plan. Speak into it: "I need four shelves, twenty-four by twelve, in three-quarter plywood." Drop in a PDF or CSV from a SketchUp extension. Paste text from an email. The app reads them.

It syncs across your devices through iCloud, with no account to create. Start a project on your phone at Home Depot, finish it on your iPad in the shop. Your data is in your iCloud — not on my server.

It costs nothing, has no ads, and will never have a subscription. I am one person, not a venture-backed startup. The app exists because I wanted it to exist.

What Kerf is not

Kerf is not a replacement for Cabinet Vision. It does not do 3D models, bill of materials, dado layouts, or hardware schedules. It does not produce cut sequences for a CNC. It does not nest parts at 12-degree angles to save half a square foot of MDF.

It is not an accounting tool. It does not track sheet inventory across projects or tell you that you are running low on ¾" birch.

It is not trying to be a community. There is no feed, no social layer, no comments, no sharing to strangers. You and your cut list, nothing else.

This is a feature. Every piece of software grows toward something, and Kerf grows toward the bench.

What makes it different

There are three specific design decisions that separate Kerf from everything else I tried:

Three strategies, pick-one-per-project

Most optimizers run a single algorithm. Kerf runs three:

• Best Offcut preserves the largest reusable scrap. The right default if you save offcuts for future projects.
• Fewest Sheets packs as tightly as physics allows. Right when plywood is expensive or scarce.
• Easiest Cuts uses a guillotine packer where every cut goes edge-to-edge. Right if your only saw is a table saw — no plunge cuts, no track saw.

That last one is something I have not seen anywhere else. Table-saw-only shops are the largest group of hobbyists I know, and no optimizer I found respected that constraint.

Photo and voice import

You have a project plan from a magazine, a napkin sketch, or a hand-written list in your shop notebook. Point your phone at it. Kerf reads the dimensions and builds the cut list for you.

Or talk to it. "Two sides, thirty-six by twelve. Four shelves, twenty-two by eleven. All three-quarter plywood." It parses that into pieces.

This is the feature people are most surprised by, and the one I use most myself. Typing measurements is slow. Retyping a list someone already wrote down is worse.

Fractional inches as a first-class citizen

Imperial woodworking is fractional. 47 ½. 24 ¼. 15⁄16. If your tool converts everything to decimal — 47.5, 24.25, 0.9375 — it is not speaking your language.

Kerf keeps fractions fractional. The input fields accept them, the layout diagrams display them, and the PDF exports print them. Tabular numerals so the measurements line up in columns. Small thing. Matters.

Who it is for

If you:

• Buy plywood by the sheet and hate wasting it.
• Work alone or with one other person.
• Own a table saw, possibly a track saw, rarely anything fancier.
• Keep your scrap pile because "you never know."
• Sketch out projects on graph paper or SketchUp, not in CAD.
• Want the software out of your way once you are at the saw.

…then Kerf is built for you. Specifically.

If you run a cabinet shop with three employees, you need something else. That is fine. We do not have to be the same thing.

Where to start

Download Kerf on the App Store. It is free. No sign-up. No card on file. If you use it once and decide it is not for you, delete it and move on — no one is going to email you about re-engagement.

If you want a deeper look at the bin-packing math behind the three strategies, the previous post walks through how the solver works.

Everything else — feedback, feature ideas, bug reports — goes to support@thekerfapp.com. One person reads every email. That person is me.