Several leading aftermarket parts suppliers got the Free-Cat ball rolling by putting up seed money to allow a manageable number of volunteers to meet and conceive the structure and governance of Free-Cat.  Those companies were, Affinia, Bosch, Cardone, Dayco, Federal Mogul, Gates, Standard Motor Products and Tenneco.

Free-Cat exists because of the hard work and creativity of a few industry visionaries who believed that the free flow of catalog data as authored and supported by its creator, the catalog departments of manufacturers, was a much better method of its distribution than the antiquated manual keying of paper catalogs by early third-party eCat companies.