Frequently asked questions

Families are produced on the Revit 2025 engine, and Revit files are forward-compatible — so they open in Revit 2025, 2026 and every newer release. (They can't open in 2024 or older; that's a Revit rule, not a BIMMER one. If you specifically need an older target, contact us.)

No. BIMMER runs Autodesk's own Revit engine in the cloud. You need Revit only to open the finished family — which your clients and their lighting designers already have. Nothing to install either: the web app runs entirely in your browser.

Your SAT and IES files are validated on our server and converted by Autodesk's cloud Revit engine (Autodesk Platform Services). If you're signed in on the website, each conversion is saved to your own private product library (original SAT + IES + delivered .rfa) so you can re-download, edit and re-issue it later — those files are stored in a private Amazon S3 bucket in the EU (Ireland), downloadable only behind your account, and you can delete any of them at any time. We never share your files, we don't train anything on them, and your photometry stays yours: the IES is embedded in your family and nowhere else. The Founding Edition desktop app is different again — it processes everything on your own machine through your own Autodesk account, so your files never reach BIMMER at all. Where everything lives, who processes it and how long we keep it is set out in the privacy policy, with the questionnaire-grade detail in Security & data.

Four validation gates check your files before and after the cloud does any work, so most problems are caught instantly with a plain-English message (e.g. "this SAT must be exported at ACIS version 7.0"). If a conversion does fail, you get the exact reason — and a failed conversion never uses up a credit, on the free trial and on every paid plan alike. The credit goes straight back into your balance automatically; there is nothing to claim and nobody to email.

2 Lite + 2 Pro conversions, free, no card. Create an account, confirm your email, convert fixtures in both editions and keep the files. Everything runs on BIMMER's own Autodesk cloud — there is nothing for you to set up. Up to three accounts on the same company domain can each start a trial, so a team can evaluate together. The allowance is also counted per network and per browser, which stops one person restarting it with a fresh account — so a team sharing one office connection may reach the limit sooner than three accounts implies. Run out mid-evaluation? Email us — a human answers.

Lite delivers the classic single merged solid (plus the light source and the electrical connector) — perfect for lighting designers. Pro keeps the fixture's parts separate in the family: each body is individually selectable with its own material, so a heatsink can be black anodised while the bezel stays white — set per part, straight in Revit. The Output toggle above the Generate button picks the edition per batch.

The light source is placed on your fixture's emitting body to the millimetre and bound to your IES photometric web. The family carries the real datasheet: Initial Intensity, Initial Color, wattage, lamp, Manufacturer, Model, Product Code, CRI, Beam Angle, IP Rating — read from the IES (you can review and complete them before converting). Every delivered file is re-opened and measured by the output gate before you get it.

You do. You keep all rights to the files you upload and to the families produced from them — the geometry, the photometry and the .rfa itself. Sell them, publish them, hand them to your clients, put them in a BIM library: there is no royalty, no attribution requirement and no licence back to us. We use your files for exactly two things: producing your family, and keeping it in your library until you delete it. The one restriction is the obvious one — you may not resell BIMMER conversions as a competing conversion service, and you confirm you're entitled to convert the geometry and photometry you upload. Both are in the terms.

A plan belongs to your company workspace, and everyone on it draws from one shared pool of credits — no per-person allowances to juggle. Each tier includes a number of seats (Starter 2, Growth 5, Scale 10); you invite colleagues by email from Account → Team, and extra seats beyond the included count are £39/seat/month. Invited teammates sign in and convert against the same balance; the workspace owner manages billing. Reselling conversions or sharing sign-ins outside your company isn't allowed (see the terms).

Credit-based Lite and Pro plans — one credit converts one fixture. Each edition has Starter, Growth and Scale tiers, billed monthly or annually (annual saves 20%), with a monthly conversion allowance that rolls over (up to 3× your allowance) while the plan is active, team seats sharing one pooled balance, and credit packs or pay-as-you-go top-ups for busy months. Everything runs on BIMMER's own Autodesk cloud — nothing to set up. See live prices on the pricing page.

Conversions stop until you top up. Nothing is billed silently, and no work runs unpaid. On an active plan you have three ways forward:

• Credit packs — 25, 100 or 500 conversions bought in one go; the bigger the pack, the lower the price per conversion. Pack credits expire 12 months after purchase.
• Pay-as-you-go — buy exactly the number of extra conversions you need, at the per-conversion rate shown on your plan.
• Move up a tier — the larger allowance applies immediately and Stripe prorates the difference.

Packs and pay-as-you-go both require an active paid subscription: they are top-ups on a plan, not a way to buy conversions without one. Two more things worth knowing before you budget: Lite and Pro credits are separate pools and don't convert into each other, and re-converting an identical SAT + IES pair is normally served from cache, which costs nothing. Live pack and top-up prices are on the pricing page.

It depends where the credit came from, and you should know this before you buy a large pack rather than after:

• Your monthly allowance and any rolled-over credits are forfeited when the plan ends. They exist because the plan exists.
• Credits you paid for separately — packs and pay-as-you-go — are frozen, not destroyed. They stay in your workspace, unusable while you have no plan, and come back in full the moment you re-subscribe.
• The catch, stated plainly: their 12-month expiry clock keeps running while they're frozen. A pack bought in January and frozen in March is gone the following January, whether or not you came back.

While a plan is active, rollover is capped at 3× your monthly allowance — credits don't accumulate indefinitely. So buy packs against conversions you will actually run inside the year, and if you're unsure which size fits, ask first.

From Account → Manage billing, which opens Stripe's billing portal. One click, nothing to email us about. Monthly plans: cancel any time — the plan and its credits run to the end of the period you have already paid for, then stop. Annual plans: billed 12 months upfront, so cancelling stops the next renewal and the current year runs to its end. Either way, what becomes of your credits is in the answer above, and the refund policy covers the 14-day money-back window if you're leaving because BIMMER isn't for you. A Founding Edition desktop licence is a different thing entirely — it's perpetual, so there is nothing to cancel.

Your files stay, and stay downloadable. Cancelling doesn't delete anything: every family, together with the original SAT and IES it was made from, remains in your library, and you can sign in and re-download any of it. What stops is making new ones — converting and re-issuing both spend credits, so they need an active plan. You can delete individual entries yourself at any time, and deleting your account deletes everything — files, folders, workspace and any remaining credits — permanently, from Account → Delete account.

Yes — the Founding Edition: a one-time, perpetual Windows desktop app, capped at 20 companies total, forever (Lite from £1,495, Pro from £2,995). It runs entirely on your own machine and your own Autodesk account — unlimited conversions, no credit system, lifetime updates, up to 5 machines. Activated with a signed key (no BIMMER account needed). See the Founding Edition section — the live seat counter shows how many of the 20 remain.

The same converter, sold as two genuinely different products. The short version: the cloud is a subscription that runs on our infrastructure; the Founding Edition is a one-time licence that runs on yours. Choose the cloud if you want zero setup, a shared team plan and a bill that tracks how much you actually convert. Choose the Founding Edition if your CAD must not leave your network, or if you convert enough that a one-time price beats a subscription. Both are on the pricing page.

Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) and a free Autodesk account. Everything else travels inside the download — the app's dependencies and the .NET runtime are bundled, so the first launch installs nothing, downloads nothing and works offline. Three things to check with IT before you buy, because the refund window closes once your key is issued:

• BIMMER itself needs no admin rights. It installs just for you, with no UAC prompt.
• Node.js is the one prerequisite. If the PC doesn't already have it, the first launch offers to install it and Windows asks for permission once — which a standard user on a locked-down machine cannot approve. Ask IT to install Node.js first (free, from nodejs.org) and BIMMER then runs with no prompts at all.
• Windows will warn you once, and that is expected. BIMMER is not code-signed yet, so the installer raises the blue "Windows protected your PC" screen and the publisher shows as unknown. Click the small More info link, then Run anyway; you won't see it again. Code signing is in progress. Until it lands, machines with Smart App Control switched on — or a policy that strips the "Run anyway" button — will block the installer outright. If that describes your estate, talk to us before buying.

Use the installer rather than the portable .zip: Windows marks every file inside a downloaded zip as untrusted, so the portable version warns on every launch. Your licence activates on up to 5 machines and needs no BIMMER account.

The BIMMER licence is one-time: no subscription, no credits and no per-conversion charge from us, ever. The one running cost is Autodesk's, and it goes straight to you — the desktop app converts through your own Autodesk Platform Services account, so Autodesk meters and bills that account directly. We never see it, never mark it up and take no cut. In our own testing a conversion uses about a minute of Autodesk processing, and the free allowance included with an Autodesk account covers roughly 200–280 conversions a month at no cost — enough for most manufacturers' ongoing work without ever paying Autodesk anything. Past that, Autodesk charges your account at their published rates. Because that is Autodesk's price list rather than ours, check the current numbers on Autodesk's own pricing page before you budget a large catalogue — and if you're sizing a several-hundred-SKU run, ask us and we'll go through it with you.

All prices are shown excluding VAT. Any applicable VAT or sales tax is calculated and shown on the secure Stripe payment page, based on your billing country. Business customers: enter your VAT number at checkout — for validated EU and UK business numbers the reverse charge applies and no VAT is added. A proper VAT invoice is emailed automatically after payment.

Cloud plans: 14 days, no quibbles, if you've converted fewer than 10 fixtures in that time. Founding Edition (perpetual desktop licence): a conditional 14-day money-back guarantee — refundable within 14 days only before your signed key is issued; once you hold a working key it's non-refundable. Full details in the refund policy.

Often, but not always — and it's better to find out now than after you've bought. Three rules decide whether a model converts well, and only one of them can mean real work:

• Export the SAT at ACIS version 7.0 (4.0 works too). Revit's importer reads older ACIS only — a newer version imports as nothing. This is an export setting, not a re-model. SolidWorks: Tools → Options → Export → ACIS → Version 7.0, Output Solid, Unit mm.
• Keep the parts as separate bodies — don't merge them. Also an export setting in most tools (SolidWorks: leave "Write multi body part into a single ACIS body" unticked). A single merged body still converts perfectly well, but you get a Lite-style family from it: Pro's part-separated output has nothing to separate.
• Model the light-emitting body first. BIMMER binds your IES to the first body in the model tree — it becomes Imported1 after SAT export. On a downlight that's the LED engine, the body just above the front bezel; on a linear it's the flat LED sheet inside the channel. This is the rule that can mean going back into CAD. The shortcut, if you'd rather not re-order: name that body with "LED", "light", "source", "emit", "lamp" or "lumen" in it and BIMMER picks it whatever position it's in.

If none of that is true of a file, it still converts — the light just lands at the centre of the whole fixture instead of on your source body. The three rules, with the placement diagram, are on the home page, and the app's pre-flight check tells you which of the three a file breaks before anything is converted or any credit is spent. Evaluating a large catalogue? Send us two or three representative exports and we'll tell you straight whether they need re-working: jiq@bimmer.lighting.

Practically all of them: SolidWorks, Creo / Pro-ENGINEER, Inventor, Rhino, Fusion 360, CATIA… anything that exports an ACIS .sat solid. One setting matters: export at ACIS version 7.0 (Revit's importer reads older ACIS only) — the app shows per-tool instructions, and the pre-flight check warns you before any conversion is attempted. The uploader also accepts the binary variant, .sab, but export the text .sat wherever your CAD offers the choice — it's the format the pre-flight checks and the part-separation step are written against.

64 MB per file and 100 files per batch — which in practice means about 50 products in one go, since each needs a SAT and an IES. Luminaire SAT exports are normally a few megabytes, so the size limit rarely bites; if one of yours does, it's usually a model exported with far more tessellation than a Revit family needs. Converting a whole catalogue? Send it in batches — each row is one product, and you get every family back in a single .zip. No limit on how many batches you run, only on the credits they spend.

Email admin@bimmer.lighting and a human answers it. That covers all of it: a file that won't convert, a Revit question, billing, VAT, a GDPR request. Send the SAT and IES that failed and you'll usually get the actual cause back rather than a checklist. We aim to reply within one business day, Monday to Friday, UK hours. Founding Edition members are answered first, for 12 months from purchase, plus the 1:1 onboarding session included with the licence — both are claimed from your Founding Edition page. Need a written SLA, SSO, or a data processing agreement? Ask — our Data Processing Agreement is published and applies automatically (we will countersign a copy if your process needs one), and Security & data answers most vendor questionnaires on its own.

Straight answers, and no dates we can't keep:

• STEP — not yet. BIMMER reads ACIS .sat and .sab. Every mainstream CAD package exports SAT, so in practice this is one export setting rather than a blocker — but STEP input is a known gap, not a shipped feature, and we won't pretend otherwise.
• IFC — no. BIMMER produces a Revit family (.rfa). IFC is a different delivery format for a different job, and we don't produce it.
• Older Revit — no, and that one isn't ours to fix. Families are built on the Revit 2025 engine, and Revit files only open forwards: 2025, 2026 and newer. If you need a 2024-or-older target, tell us — we'd like to know how often it's asked for.
• macOS — the web app already works. BIMMER Cloud runs in any modern browser, Mac included; there is nothing to install. It's BIMMER Desktop that is Windows-only.