In my opinion, the big selling point of offers such as bikefitting.com (by Shimano) and Retül is their large frame databases. In the context of BikeCAD, you could use the fit advisor to determine a starting point for the bike geometry, then potentially refine it by putting the rider on a fitting bike and then you could use those databases to automatically create a ranking of the frames that come closest to the target geometry, among all the available frames on the market. With BikeCAD being a framebuilding tool, you could obviously weld that frame yourself, but assuming that not every customer wants to pay for that, this would be the next best option to achieve a close to ideal fit.
Mindblowingly, I recently learned that these commercial tools don't seem to actually work that way! I don't know about Retül, but I spoke with some people about the bikefitting.com software and apparently Shimano decided to be "neutral" and therefore not recommend one manufacturer over the other. Obviously, this is the opposite of neutral and the main reason they did that is because bike shops want to sell their own brand and not recommend the customer a different brand with a more suitable geometry. The way it works is that, like BikeCAD, they determine an ideal target geometry, however then you need to pre-select two or three different frames and the software then selects the best frame size among this deliberately very limited set of frames.
As an independent bike shop, I would want to actually make full use of the database and create a ranking comparing ALL the available frames. There are some open source databases such as 99spokes.com, but I heard some mixed opinions about the reliability of their data, since it's basically crowdsourced. Are there commercial databases like bikefitting.com that actually have an "open" approach in the way that I'm looking for? If not, what experiences did people here make with the non-commercial databases? Which one is the most reliable and do they have good filtering or API options to achieve what I want?
Thank you!
BikeCAD frame geometry database
The BikeCAD Design archive was setup with this sort of thing in mind. You can search the Design archive for production or non-production bikes. You can search by style, material, brand, model, year and by size based on stack and reach.
The BikeCAD Design archive is also crowd sourced, so you may not find all brands and models there and there is no guarantee that all records will be perfect. However, if you have BikeCAD models of any particular bike, I'd be grateful if you added it to the archive, so the database can grow to become the valuable resource we'd all like it to be.