Load your rate book once
Your labour by the hour or the unit, materials at what your supplier charges you. An afternoon from a spreadsheet. Everything after this is priced from it, and when lumber moves you change it in one place.
Estimating
The AI does the measuring. Your rate book does the pricing.
Describe the job the way you would to a foreman. You get quantities, phases and hours — priced from your own rates, never a national average.
New estimate from a walkthrough, not a plan set
“Full bathroom gut, 8 by 10. Remove tub, install 3x5 tiled shower with a glass door. New vanity, toilet, tile floor. Move the plumbing about two feet. 1960s house, plaster walls.”
Demolition & disposal your rate $1,240
Plumbing rough-in — relocate 2 ft your rate $2,180
Shower — 92 sq ft wall tile, waterproofing your rate $4,415
Floor tile — 80 sq ft your rate $1,860
Fixtures, paint & finish your rate $3,290
Flagged for you: plaster walls on a 1960s house usually add a day of prep. Not priced — your call.
“It doesn’t know my prices”
Every contractor’s first reaction, and it is correct
The problem: Most AI estimating prices from a national average database. It knows what drywall costs across a continent. It does not know your supplier gives you a better rate, that your labour is $165 an hour, or that you always add a day for an old house.
An estimate built on somebody else’s numbers is not a shortcut. It is a document you have to check line by line, which is slower than writing it yourself.
- The measuring is real work and takes an hour — that part should be automated
- The pricing is your business — that part never should be
- A number you do not trust is a number you re-do
Database pricing
Where it comes from: a national average, maintained by someone else, in another country.
What you do with it: check every line against what you would actually charge.
Your rate book
Where it comes from: your labour rates, your supplier prices, your markup.
What you do with it: read it, adjust the judgement calls, send it.
How an estimate gets built
Stop estimating. Start reviewing.
Four steps, and you only do two of them. Tell it what you’re building; a complete, structured estimate comes back. Your job changes from writing the thing to checking it — and nothing is ever changed silently, because an estimate you do not understand is worse than one you wrote yourself.
Describe the job out loud
No plan set — renovation work rarely has one. A scope, photos and measurements from the walkthrough. That is the input.
Works out quantities, then stops
92 sq ft of wall tile, 80 of floor, the phases and roughly how long each takes. Then pricing is looked up in your rate book line by line. If it cannot match one confidently, it declines rather than guessing.
Checks the work before you see it
Hours that do not fit the area, a toilet billed in two phases, porcelain tile at $1.10 a square foot, a shower with no waterproofing. Mechanical fixes apply in one click; judgement calls are flagged and left alone.
Where the estimate goes
It stops being a document and becomes the job.
EstimateScheduleBudgetInvoiceJob marginBooks & HST
Accept the quote and the phases become your schedule, the line items become the budget you check real costs against, and the invoice comes off the same numbers. One set of figures, entered once — which is why the margin you see mid-job is true.
What it is, and what it is not
- Built for renovation and trades — bathrooms, kitchens, basements, decks, additions. Crews of two to fifteen.
- It reads plans, but it is not takeoff software. Upload a permit set or drawings and it reads every page — the dimensions and areas printed on the sheet, the schedules, what is being demolished or relocated, what the permit requires — and those numbers feed the quantities. What it will not do is measure an unlabelled wall against the scale bar; it flags that as not dimensioned so you measure it yourself. If you bid from full plan sets daily and need every quantity derived off the paper, use a dedicated takeoff platform.
- Not commercial estimating. No CSI cost codes, no bid levelling, no ITB packages.
- Not a pricing database. It has no opinion about what things cost. That is the point.
Built in Canada, for Canadian jobs
HST at your provincial rateyes
Prices in CAD, no conversionyes
WSIB in your burdened labouryes
Construction Act holdbackyes
US average price databaseno
Not sure how to structure a quote in the first place? How to build an accurate estimate →
Test it on a job you have already quoted.
Load your rates, describe a job you priced by hand, and compare the two. That is the only test that matters.
7 days free · no credit card · then $49.99/mo for 3 months