Three engineers, zero marketing budget — we built a calculation tool and need real users to tell us if it’s any good

Mechanical engineer here, 10+ years in industry. My co-founders and I got tired of the same weekly routine — formula book, googling standards, digging up old Excel sheets just to size a bolt or check a weld — so we built a small tool called Strix that does those standard calculations directly, with the method visible so you can check the work.

We’re well aware of the obvious problem: three engineers testing their own tool proves nothing. It felt faster for us, but we’re biased, and we’d rather hear what’s wrong with it now than after building in the wrong direction for a year. It’s hand-coded, no AI-generated code, built on established standards — but you have no reason to take our word for that either.

So a genuine question for people who do this work daily: how do you handle standard calcs today, and what would a tool like this have to show before you’d trust it with real work? There’s a free trial if anyone wants to poke at it, but the answers matter more to us than the signups. Solumea.com is our website.