BenchUp is a free, open-source 3D modelling app for woodworking and furniture design — and on November 9, 2026 it hit the front page of Hacker News. We opened version 0.6.6 in the browser and built a real, precisely measured box with it, to check whether the hype survives contact with a real project.
BenchUp is a free, open-source 3D edge-and-face modeller (MIT licence), written in Rust and running as a native Windows, macOS or Linux app — or directly in a desktop browser through WebAssembly, with WebGPU and a WebGL2 fallback. It is built for woodworking and furniture design: you sketch lines and shapes, use Push/Pull to add thickness, and snap to geometry with exact measurements. It ships joinery tools (mortise-and-tenon, dovetail, half-lap and more), wood-grain orientation, cut lists and cutting plans, and it can import SketchUp .skp geometry and export Wavefront .obj and STL files. No account, no login, no payment anywhere.
It was called KetchUp until the morning of November 9, 2026, when the project renamed itself BenchUp (the old site and editor address still work). The same day its Hacker News post reached 656 points with 193 comments, the GitHub repo showed 546 stars just 17 days after it was created, and version 0.6.6 was released on November 8. A surge that big deserves a hands-on check instead of a summary of other people's posts, so we ran one — in the browser editor, with our own hands, on our own model.
Requirements (from the official README): a desktop browser with hardware acceleration and WebGPU or WebGL2 support, plus a mouse and keyboard for modelling. There is nothing to install for the browser version: open benchup3d.github.io/editor/ and click Try in browser. Our test ran in a real Chromium browser on November 9, 2026. The first launch shows the release notes for version 0.6.6; we verified the version again in Help > About, which reported the same number.
Prefer a desktop app instead? The repo's Releases page offers free installers for Windows x64, macOS Apple Silicon and Linux x64. We tested the browser version only, so treat the desktop builds as documented-but-not-verified-by-us.
Target: a box we modelled ourselves for the test — a 600 mm × 400 mm rectangle pulled up 450 mm, the kind of dimensioned part a woodworker would actually cut (think a small cabinet carcass or a shelf box). Every number below is what the app itself reported back, not what we typed in and assumed.
Press R to activate Rectangle. The status bar reads: "Click two opposite corners · Type width,height (5m,50mm) + Enter", and a dimensions box sits at the bottom right. Two things caught us out: dragging does not draw a rectangle — the tool wants two clicks on opposite corners — and the default unit is metres, so you must type the unit (600mm,400mm). We clicked the first corner, typed 600mm,400mm and pressed Enter. Selecting everything (Ctrl+A) reported back: 4 edges · 1 face, edges of 0.400 m · 0.600 m · 0.400 m · 0.600 m, area 0.240 m², perimeter 2.000 m. Exact, first try.
Press P for Push/Pull, click the face, and drag upward. The status bar and the Distance box show the height live as you drag (we saw 0.329 m mid-drag); typing 450mm + Enter sets it exactly. Selecting everything again reported: Object lengths X 0.600 m, Y 0.400 m, Z 0.450 m; 16 edges · 7 faces; total surface area 1.620 m². The height we asked for is the height we got.
Press T for Tape Measure and click both ends of the bottom edge. The Properties panel reported "Tape Measure: 0.600 m", the canvas showed a 0.600 label, and the Length box read 0.600 m — matching the 600 mm we entered in the first step. One quirk: the tool defaults to creating a guide line (it left a blue dashed reference line along the edge); the panel hints that Ctrl/Command toggles pure measure mode.
| What we checked | Result |
|---|---|
| Editor loads in a desktop browser, no account | Passed. Viewport, grid, axes, menus, toolbar and side panels all rendered; no WebGPU fallback warning. |
| Rectangle with typed dimensions 600 × 400 mm | Passed. App reported back 0.600 × 0.400 m, area 0.240 m², perimeter 2.000 m. |
| Push/Pull to an exact height of 450 mm | Passed. Box reported X 0.600 m, Y 0.400 m, Z 0.450 m; 16 edges · 7 faces. |
| Tape measure reads the edge back | Passed. 0.600 m, matching the rectangle we drew. |
| Export as Wavefront OBJ | Partially verified. File > Export > Wavefront OBJ triggered a download ("Geometry download started"), but our test session could not show the download bar, so we did not verify the file name or size. |
| Save a portable .bup project file | Failed in our test environment. Ctrl+S raised a "Project file" error: the browser refused the save-file picker. This looks like a restriction of our headless test browser, not necessarily an app bug — but we cannot claim saving works until we see it succeed. Local autosave ("Modified · saved locally") worked throughout. |
Our verdict: the core modelling loop is real and precise — typed dimensions go in, and the app's own readouts confirm the same numbers back. For a free tool that is 17 days old, that is the part that matters most. The rough edges are honest ones — see the next section — not hidden ones.
600mm, not 600) or you will model in metres by accident.BenchUp3D/editor (formerly Ketchup3D/app) and the official editor at benchup3d.github.io/editor/. We verified both against the project's own pages before testing.Yes — it is open source under the MIT licence, in the browser and as desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux. You can use it in commercial projects. Your own time and materials are separate costs, but the software itself costs nothing.
For the core workflow — draw a shape, pull it into a solid, measure it, export it — yes, and we verified each step ourselves. It is not a full replacement yet: it is 17 days old, it has no cloud storage or mobile version, and features like .skp import, STL export and the joinery tools are documented but were not part of our test. If your work depends on a specific SketchUp feature, check that feature before switching.
No — the browser editor runs from a web page, no account needed. You need a desktop browser with WebGPU or WebGL2 and a mouse and keyboard; the project says mobile is outside this version. Native desktop apps are also available free from the repo's Releases page.
The File > Import menu offers SketchUp (.skp), STL, Wavefront OBJ and DXF 2D. The project notes that SketchUp textures, scenes and some model features aren't supported, and OBJ export includes geometry without materials. We did not test importing in this round, so treat import as documented-but-not-verified-by-us.
The project renamed itself from KetchUp to BenchUp on November 9, 2026 — the same day it hit the Hacker News front page. The project hasn't published a reason we could verify; the old addresses (ketchup3d.github.io) still work and redirect to the new name. Use the current name, BenchUp, when you search for it.
Open the browser editor, press R, click a corner, type a real board size (for example 600mm,400mm) and press Enter, then P and pull it to your board thickness. If the app reads your numbers back correctly — as it did for us — you have a working digital tape measure and saw for your next cut.
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