Built by someone who has run the jobs, not just the software.
Draftly takes you from an address to a council-ready set of documents. Because that touches building safety, it matters who is behind it and where the facts come from. Both are on this page.
Gavin Adams
Draftly is built and run by one person in Melbourne. That is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind a “we”.
- Founded, scaled and exited GG Engineering (Aust) Pty Ltd. An engineering business built from nothing to a sale — so the workflow Draftly automates is one that was run commercially first, for years, with real deadlines and real liability.
- Delivered major racing and turf-club infrastructure across Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong — institutional clients, formal approval processes, and documentation that had to survive scrutiny.
- On-site consultations across Melbourne metro. Draftly’s site-visit capture tools exist because the same person who wrote them attends properties and needed them.
- Draftly itself is the current work — the planning-data integrations, the structural engine and the drawing output are all built in-house rather than licensed and rebadged.
Nothing is guessed.
This is the part worth checking before you trust any tool in this space, so it is stated as a rule rather than a promise.
Planning facts come only from official government spatial data. Council, zone, overlays, easements and the controls that apply to your land are read from the authorities’ own published services — not scraped, not estimated, and not produced by a language model.
Anything that cannot be verified is left out rather than filled in. If a data source is silent or unavailable for your address, Draftly says so. A blank is honest; a confident guess about a setback or an overlay is how someone builds the wrong thing.
AI is used for reading your documents, not for producing planning facts. Where Draftly extracts information from a plan or a report you upload, that is what the model is doing — extraction and classification. It is never the source of a compliance answer.
Structural work is calculated, not estimated. Member sizing and checks run against the Australian Standards the relevant material is governed by, from one shared engine, so the drawings and the calculations always describe the same building.
Where Draftly stops.
A tool that will not tell you its limits is not one to rely on for a building approval. These are Draftly’s.
Draftly does not replace a registered professional
Draftly prepares documents and does the calculation and drafting work. It is not a registered building surveyor, and it does not issue permits or approvals.
Engineering calculations and drawings produced by Draftly are indicative, and are to be confirmed by your engineer or certifier before lodgement. For work that requires a registered engineer’s certification, a building surveyor’s assessment, or a formal planning decision, that person remains in the loop — Draftly gets the job to their desk in a state they can actually check, which is the part that normally takes weeks.
Approval requirements also differ by state and by council, and they change. Draftly reflects the published controls for your address at the time you run it; it does not promise an outcome.
Details, for the record.
Draftly is a service-area business — consultations happen at your site, so there is no public office to visit. Email is the fastest way to reach a person.