The Wrap: 2025
So here we are at that time of year where we look back at everything that's happened in 2025, and wow, what a ride it's been! Making the switch from Speckel to Better Building really lit a fire under the team and unlocked some serious momentum for our platform.
After six years of dedicated development, Speckel officially retired on June 30, 2025, making way for Better Building: a complete transformation that reflects our evolved mission as an all-in-one solution for sustainable design that's now supporting projects around the world.
With nearly 6000 projects delivered on the platform this year, including almost 20,000 designs, our small but agile team have been keeping up with your requirements and still have lots more energy to continue to improve.
Major Wins This Year
We've packed in some major wins this year. We were absolutely stoked to support the Building Simulation 2025 conference in Brisbane, where we got to connect with the global building performance community and showcase how far we've come.
One of our biggest launches has been Flows: our game-changing project management feature that's been getting rave reviews. Flows lets you set goals, track timelines, assign responsibilities, store documents, and stay effortlessly organized right where your modeling happens. No more jumping between platforms or drowning in email threads; everything's in one place. We've even added budget management and time expense tracking to help teams stay on top of project finances.
And speaking of making life easier, we've seriously beefed up our back-end with converters for everything from Rhino and SketchUp to IES and DesignBuilder. Translation? You can get your models loaded way faster now, whether you're working with EpJSON files or other formats. We've even been testing new features with early adopters to make sure these tools work seamlessly in real-world workflows.
New Open-Source Sandbox Tools
We've always believed in making sustainable design accessible to everyone, and this year we've doubled down on that commitment with some powerful free tools. Our 3D Building Geometry Creator V1.2 are for designers who need to quickly generate building models without the overhead of complex CAD software.
Even better, we launched our completely free Heat Transfer Simulator, which we showcased in a dedicated webinar that got amazing feedback from the community. These open-source tools are part of our mission to democratize access to quality building performance analysis, especially for students, educators, and professionals in developing regions who might not have access to expensive software suites.
We also get to grab some great feedback to consider the adoption of these tools and features within our platform next year.
Heat Transfer Simulator I 3D Building Geometry Creator
Breaking into the US Market
As we close out the year, we're zeroing in on the U.S. market with our adoption of ASHRAE 90.1 Section 11 and Appendix G for 2019 (with 2025 coming in January 2026).
This is huge: it's given us the foundation to seriously level up our HVAC modeling capabilities with new templates, an HVAC grouping feature (some call it multiplexing) and design day simulations. These advanced features will be rolling out to Plus and Premium users across all platforms when you're back from the holidays, giving you the tools to handle everything from VRF systems (yes, condenser curves matter!) to comprehensive energy modeling that meets U.S. code requirements.
Fresh Look, Smarter Features
Speaking of the new year: expect to see some exciting changes when you log back in! The biggest visual upgrade? Our brand-new dashboards feature. We're bringing all your project data, design work, team info, and conversations together in one central team dashboard. Finding what you need will be way quicker, and managing teams across different locations and time zones just got a whole lot easier.
We will also be bringing the NZ and AU market back into focus in the New Year, to roll out updates for H1 and NCC 2025.
Under the Hood Improvements
And that's not all: we're also turbocharging our simulations with computational enhancements and extra robustness as we migrate to a more secure and reliable simulation framework.
For those working in Australia and New Zealand, we've continued supporting Specification 44 for NCC 2022 thermal performance and launched our new low-cost Lite plan for H1 energy efficiency modeling. We've even partnered with NatHERS Cert IV Assessors to provide free access to Spec 44 resources.
Looking Ahead
The transition from Speckel to Better Building isn't just a rebrand; it's a complete evolution of what we set out to do. What started as a local platform focused on building material specification in Melbourne is now a global mission to enable better, more sustainable buildings everywhere. And based on what we've accomplished in 2025, we're just getting started.
Here's to an amazing year ahead! Have a great Christmas all!
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