Board Cutting Optimizer turns a list of piece lengths you need into the cheapest combination of stock lengths to buy, together with an exact cutting plan for every board.
Enter the pieces you need to cut, the stock lengths you can buy with their prices, and the saw kerf. The tool checks every sensible way of cutting the boards and shows you the plan with the lowest total cost, updating automatically as you type.
What This Tool Solves
Anyone cutting lumber, aluminum profiles, PVC pipe, or any other linear stock material runs into the same question: given the lengths you need and the stock lengths available at the store, which stock lengths should you buy, and how should each one be cut, to spend as little money as possible and waste as little material as possible?
Doing this by hand is tedious and error-prone as soon as more than a couple of different piece lengths are involved. This tool automates it:
- enter any number of distinct piece lengths, each with a quantity
- enter any number of stock lengths, each with a price
- get the lowest-cost purchase and cutting plan, with the saw kerf already accounted for
- see a visual cutting diagram for every board, plus a text summary
It works for any linear material and any unit, millimeters, centimeters, inches, or feet, as long as you enter every length in the same unit.
How to Use the Cutting Optimizer
- List the pieces you need. For every distinct length, add a row with the length and how many pieces of it you need.
- List your stock lengths and prices. Add a row for every length you can buy, together with its price. You can list several stock lengths at once, for example a cheaper short board and a pricier long one, and let the tool decide which mix is cheapest.
- Set the kerf. This is the width of material removed by the saw blade on every cut, in the same unit as your lengths. Use
0if you want to ignore it. - Read the plan. The result updates as soon as you change a number, no button to click. Each board shows which pieces are cut from it, in which order, how much of the board is used, and how much is left over.
The tool opens with a filled-in example so you can see a real plan right away. Use Clear All to start from an empty sheet.
What Is Kerf, and Why It Matters
The kerf is the thickness of the cut itself, the material the saw blade removes as sawdust. It is easy to forget when planning a cutting list by hand, but it adds up: every additional cut you make on a board slightly shortens how much usable length remains for the next piece.
This tool applies the kerf per cut on each board: every piece cut from a board consumes its own length plus one kerf width, except when a piece ends exactly at the end of the board, in which case no extra cut is needed there. A typical circular saw or table saw kerf is around 2 to 3 mm (roughly 1/8 inch); check your own blade if you need an exact value.
Minimizing Cost, Not Just the Number of Boards
Buying stock in multiple lengths at different prices is common, thicker or longer boards are rarely priced proportionally to their length. Because of that, the cheapest plan is not always the one that uses the fewest boards, and it is not always the one with the least leftover material either.
This tool always optimizes for the lowest total price first. Among equally cheap plans, it prefers the one with less total waste, and among those, the one using fewer boards.
Reading the Cutting Plan
The result panel shows four summary numbers: the total cost, the number of stock lengths purchased, the total waste including material left over at the end of each board, and the portion of that waste caused specifically by the saw kerf.
Below the summary, every purchased board is drawn to scale as a bar. Each colored segment is one piece, thin red slivers mark the kerf removed by each cut, and any gray section at the end is leftover offcut. The same information is repeated as a text list underneath, useful for printing or copying into a cutting list.
Typical Use Cases
- Planning shelving, framing, or furniture builds from standard lumber lengths
- Cutting aluminum extrusion or PVC pipe to a parts list
- Comparing whether buying longer stock lengths actually saves money once kerf and offcuts are factored in
- Quickly checking if a project fits within a fixed number of boards before going to the store