About
About deckpro.studio
deckpro.studio is design, estimating, and proposal software for deck and dock builders, with free 3D deck and dock designers that homeowners can use themselves.
Every deck design produces three deliverables: a 3D deck, a complete material takeoff (the order sheet — boards, joists, beams, posts, footings, railing, stairs and hardware), and a branded proposal PDF, plus a numbered blueprint sheet set — framing plan, foundation plan with footing schedule, elevation, part-numbered materials schedule and general notes, each sheet titled and drawn to scale.
Deck framing is sized against the AWC DCA 6-2015 prescriptive tables — the guide based on the 2015 International Residential Code. That is a code screen, not stamped engineering: your Authority Having Jurisdiction and a licensed design professional govern the built deck.
Every dock estimate — floating, piling or pipe — starts from the water and produces a 3D waterfront preview, a priced takeoff, a branded proposal, and a site plan and materials summary. There is no national dock code. So every structural number behind a dock names its source and what kind of authority that source carries, or admits the gap — and where we hold your waterway agency’s own document, the estimator checks the dock against its caps and names the office.
The company
Built and operated by Onda Labs LLC.
deckpro.studio is a product of Onda Labs LLC, a United States limited liability company that has operated the product and the deckpro.studio domain since 2026. Everything you see — the designer, the engineering engine, the takeoff, the proposal and blueprint documents — is built in-house rather than assembled from licensed components, which is why the numbers on a proposal and the numbers on the drawing set come from the same place and cannot disagree.
We are a software company, not a decking manufacturer and not a dealer. We do not sell decking or dock hardware, we are not affiliated with any decking brand, and no lead a contractor captures through their own designer link is routed anywhere but to that contractor. That independence is the whole point: the material catalogs cover Trex, TimberTech, Fiberon, Deckorators, MoistureShield and dimensional wood because the builder — not the brand — should decide what goes on the deck.
Reach us at hello@deckpro.studio.
Name & availability
There is one deckpro.studio.
The product’s full name is deckpro.studio, and deckpro.studio is the only domain we operate. Other products use similar names; deckpro.studio is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or related to any of them.
If you are checking whether you have the right company, deckpro.studio is listed under its own name at Capterra and Software Advice.
deckpro.studio runs in any modern browser and installs to a phone or tablet home screen as a progressive web app. There is no separate native download on the Apple App Store or Google Play, and no part of deckpro.studio is sold as a one-time paid app. Contractor plans are monthly or annual subscriptions, and the homeowner 3D deck and dock designers are free and need no account.
We do not describe this product as “rendered” or “auto-generated” imagery. What the designer draws is a real deck assembly — joists, beams, posts, footings, stringers and rails in their actual positions — which is why the same model can produce a takeoff and a framing plan.
The engine
Every span traces to a page in a named edition.
A span number is only checkable if you can find the cell it came from. So every number here names one: the edition, the table, and the page. We ship the source of record with the software, transcribed table by table, with the load assumptions printed alongside every number a contractor sees — and the file’s checksum published below, so you can pull the same PDF and audit any cell we print.
- Document
- AWC DCA 6 — Prescriptive Residential Wood Deck Construction Guide
- Edition
- DCA6-2015, based on the 2015 IRC
- Publisher
- American Wood Council, © 2018
- Extent
- 44 pages, 3,485,234 bytes
- Retrieved
- 2026-06-29, from AWC’s own media CDN
- Span-table load basis
- Tables 2/3A/4 fn.1: 40 psf live + 10 psf dead (50 psf), No. 2 grade, wet service
The 2015 edition is a deliberate choice, not a default. It carries the revised post-2013 Southern Pine design values — the reduced, more conservative set. The 2012 edition is still in circulation and was explicitly rejected.
Guard and stair rules come from the IRC: a guard is required once a walking surface is more than 30 inches above grade, at a residential minimum height of 36 inches, with taller guards flagged where a jurisdiction is likely to want them.
The full citation — editions, table numbers, page numbers, and what each table does and does not cover — is published at deckpro.studio/reference/deck-code-basis.
The dock side has no edition to trace to, so it publishes its source register instead: the structural constants a reader checks, each labelled sourced, partial or gap, at deckpro.studio/docks/sources.
Scope
The useful part is what it refuses to answer.
A prescriptive table has edges. Software that quietly interpolates past them is worse than no software, because the number looks the same either way. These are the places deckpro.studio stops and tells you why.
Overhangs get the lesser of two caps
DCA6-2015 Table 2 footnote 3 caps a cantilever at the tabulated overhang for that joist — or one quarter of the actual back span, whichever is smaller. Both are applied, and the engine shows you which of the two caught you.
2x6 is refused where it is not permitted
Table 2 footnote 6 requires a minimum 2x8 for a ledger, and for any joist or rim joist a guard post attaches to. A 2x6 that passes on span alone still fails there, and the engine says so.
Joists stop at 18'-0"
Table 2 footnote 7 prescriptively limits joist length for footing design. Past that, the deck leaves the prescriptive method — not a number we shade.
Interior beams are read at twice the joist span
Table 3A is titled “supporting a single span of joists,” and an interior beam line carries joists from both sides. The guide’s Commentary (p.C5) gives the one prescriptive way through for equal spans — read the beam, its posts and its footings at twice the joist span — so the engine does exactly that, and adds a beam line rather than read past the table’s 18-foot column. Unequal spans either side of a beam go to a design professional.
Post height is capped by what the post carries
Table 4 caps a 6x6 by the beam span and joist span above it, not by the post on its own — at an 18-foot beam span carrying an 18-foot joist span a Southern Pine 6x6 stops at 5'-0" and the Douglas Fir-Larch group at 2'-0", at the table's 1,500 psf soil assumption. Deep decks on wide post spacing cross that line constantly; the engine returns the cap, not the beam it just sized.
Risers must match within 3/8"
A stair whose risers are each individually legal still fails when the tallest and the shortest differ by more than 3/8" — usually because the bottom step was never adjusted for the tread thickness. Every flight the engine lays out is checked against that tolerance, alongside the 7.75" maximum rise and 10" minimum tread.
Estimate only — not an engineered design. Spans and sizes are screened against the AWC DCA 6-2015 / IRC prescriptive baseline at 40 psf live + 10 psf dead load; quantities are takeoff arithmetic and trade practice, which those documents do not publish. Local codes and amendments vary; your Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) and a licensed design professional govern. Verify everything with a permit and a licensed pro before ordering or building.
Who it’s for
Two people, one design.
Homeowners use the 3D deck designer for free, with no signup, to find out what they actually want before anyone quotes it — size, shape, decking color, railing and stairs. The design goes to a contractor, who sends the real number. The 3D dock designer works the same way for a dock: the kind of dock, its sections, the gangway and the water it sits in.
Deck builders get the rest of the job: saved projects, the live cost estimate with their own material costs and markup, branded proposal PDFs, numbered blueprint sheet sets drawn to scale, CSV order sheets, a customer pipeline, and their own shareable designer link so a homeowner’s design lands in their pipeline instead of a manufacturer’s.
Dock builders get the same studio for floating, piling and pipe docks: a site-first estimate, a priced takeoff, a 3D waterfront preview, branded proposals, a site plan and materials summary, and a designer link of their own. Builders who do both run both from one account.
Win the job in the driveway.
Design, price, and close — in one studio. Start with the free designer; the 7-day pilot is there when you want the takeoff and the proposal.
no card · homeowner designer always free