It says what it does not know
Came length is an estimate and the app says so. A check that would cry wolf is left out.
How Nessie started
Nessie started on a workbench, not in a pitch deck.
The first version was a spreadsheet, because one of us kept finding at the grinder what should have been obvious on paper: a curve that could not be cut, a piece too thin to hold, a sheet bought twice because an offcut was measured wrong.
Every drawing tool we tried treated glass like vector art. None of them knew an inside curve has a minimum radius, or that a sliver two millimeters across will snap in your hand. So we built the one that checks, and leaves the fix to whoever is holding the cutter.
What we hold to, including when it costs us
Your designs are yours
No license claimed, nothing sold, nothing trained on. Every panel keeps its full history.
No dark patterns
No countdown timers, no invented scarcity, and the way out is where you would expect it.
Built by people who cut glass
Every feature since the first came from something that went wrong on a bench.
The whole team. It is a short list
Two people, both of whom answer their own email.
Ayden
Product & the public side
Looks after everything you see before you sign in: the site, the glass library and the community.
Martin Meza
Engineering & the workbench
Builds the drawing surface, the cuttability checks and the geometry that keeps a cut list honest.
Ayden
Product & the public side
Hello! My name is Ayden, and I am the manager of the public side of Nessie. I am 24 years old and I am from Phoenix, Arizona.
I have only worked with stained glass for the last five months or so, but as I started working professionally in this field I saw how outdated and horrible the other software was. None of them did anything correctly when it came to stained glass. You just had to retrofit them to work.
We knew there was a better way to do this, especially with how fast the technology is moving. Martin and I set out to build what we call Nessie: one program for stained glass that does all of it, so you can design it, see it and build it.
Martin Meza
Engineering & the workbench
I build the workbench: the drawing surface, the geometry underneath it and the checks that tell you a shape cannot be cut before you have spent glass finding out. A panel in Nessie is a subdivision of the plane rather than a pile of shapes, which is why drawing a line across a piece makes two pieces and why the pieces either side keep their glass.
The part I care most about is the arithmetic being honest. A cut list that quietly rounds, or a came length that flatters the order, is worse than no cut list, so where a number is still an estimate the app says so rather than hiding it.
Straight answers to the awkward questions
The things worth knowing before you trust a small company with your work.
- You do. Nessie stores them so you can pick them up on another machine, and we claim no license over your work or use it to train anything. Self-serve export is not built yet. Until it is, ask us and we will get your data out for you.
- They stay readable, and nothing is deleted without you asking for it. You will not be locked out of your own patterns to force a renewal.
- No. There is no advertising on Nessie and no data broker in the chain. The only companies that touch it are Clerk, Supabase and Vercel, which run sign-in, the database and the hosting. The privacy policy says what each one holds.
- Came length is halved as an approximation until the document tracks which edges adjoin, so treat it as an estimate. The sheet layout does not yet account for directional texture. Both are on the list, and neither is hidden from you in the app.
How to reach us. A person, not a queue
- Emailhello@nessiedesign.com
- RepliesWithin one working day
- CommunityThe forum usually answers faster
- SupportMonday to Friday
Come and break something.
Start a panel, push the checks until they complain, and tell us where we are wrong. That is how every feature here got made.