GoSpacePlan

The problem

Planning a room usually starts with a tape measure and a blank sheet. Turning those measurements into a layout that works, with furniture that fits and space to walk around it, takes either design software with a learning curve or a lot of sketching and erasing.

Many people only need to plan one room or one flat. They do not want to create an account, learn a professional tool or pay for it. They want to enter their measurements, see a few sensible options, adjust one, and take the result with them.

What we built

GoSpacePlan is a free floor plan and room layout planner that runs in the browser:

• Generated layouts. Enter a room’s measurements and GoSpacePlan generates up to three layouts to start from.
• A 2D editor for adjusting a layout until it fits.
• A 3D view for checking how the layout feels before committing to it.
• PDF export, so a plan can be printed or shared with a builder, landlord or family member.
• 73 templates to start from instead of a blank plan.
• No sign-up. Projects stay in the user’s own browser.

GoSpacePlan is in beta. It is usable today, and the beta label tells users it is still being refined.

How it runs

The front end is built with React 19 and bundled with Vite. The 3D view is built with three.js. Server-side work runs through an API written in Go.

Because projects are kept in the browser, there are no user accounts to manage and no plans stored on our servers. That keeps the product simple to use and simple to operate, with one trade-off made clear to the user: a project lives on the device and browser where it was made.

GoSpacePlan runs on the same setup as our other products: Docker on a Linux server we manage, behind Caddy, with HTTPS certificates from Let’s Encrypt issued and renewed automatically.

What it taught us

GoSpacePlan is a product with a lot of interface and little paperwork, and building it shaped practices we use on client web applications:

• Give people a starting point. Generated layouts and templates get a user to something useful faster than an empty canvas. In client products, we look for the defaults and examples that save a user’s first few minutes.
• Keep one source of truth behind several views. A plan edited in 2D and checked in 3D has to show the same thing in both. When a client app shows the same data in more than one way, we keep one model underneath so the views cannot disagree.
• Ask for an account only when it adds something. Not every tool needs sign-up. When a client feature can work without one, we say so, and when it cannot, we explain why.
• Be clear about where data lives. Keeping projects in the browser is a design decision with consequences, and users should know them.
• Use the right language for each part. A React front end and a Go API each do the job they suit. We choose the stack per part of a client system rather than forcing one tool on all of it.
• Label a beta as a beta. It sets honest expectations while a product is still changing.

Where it’s going

GoSpacePlan is in beta and free to use. Work continues on the planner as it stands: generated layouts from measurements, the 2D editor and 3D view, templates and PDF export.