All ideas / Home services and trades
AI takeoff and estimating tool for trade contractors
AI takeoff and estimating tool for trade contractors' plans and site sheets
How much it itches 32 of 40
Will people pay 3 of 35
- Job to be done
- When a contractor receives plans, site sheets or scanned drawings, the estimator needs to turn them into accurate quantities and a priced estimate, so they can bid faster and avoid supplier trips and errors.
- Buyer
- Estimators at specialty and trade contractors
- How often it comes up
- Every job
- How critical
- Medium
- Evidence layers
- 3 of 9
- What to build
- A model can read plans and scanned drawings to extract quantities and draft a priced takeoff, work estimators now do by hand.
Customer complaints 8
Owners and users describing the problem in their own words: Reddit, low-star reviews, App Store, Ask HN.
Admin work like renaming scanned PDFs, finding buried scope exclusions, retyping numbers from PDFs, and comparing addenda eats large amounts of time, while the boss wants an AI takeoff tool.
r/Construction 497 upvotes
Frequently runs short on materials, causing emergency supply runs, and is left with leftover sheets of OSB that clutter storage.
r/Construction 39 upvotes
Commercial quoting is slow and error-prone, relying on spreadsheets, notepad walkthroughs, and back-and-forth with GCs.
r/electricians 11 upvotes
Needs accurate pipe and fitting quantity takeoff for bills of materials and wants to know if AI estimating tools work.
r/Plumbing 3 upvotes
Manually tallying items from site sheets and building estimates is slow; wants to turn a scanned sheet into a priced estimate.
r/electricians 2 upvotes
Manual takeoffs and materials estimates are tedious, and ChatGPT cannot handle the volume of inputs from plans.
r/electricians 2 upvotes
Slow cost estimates are causing contractor to lose customers to faster competitors.
r/Construction 2 upvotes
Material takeoffs for fences of different types take 15-20 minutes per job by hand or in spreadsheets, causing errors and extra supplier trips.
r/sweatystartup 0 upvotes
Funds raised 1
Money investors put into companies solving it: SEC Form D filings since 2024, reported funding rounds, and raises among G2 sellers.
Togal.AI raised $1.2M (Construction Estimating Software on G2)
SEC Form D filing 2025-08-27
Incumbent gaps 8
Who sells today on G2 and what their customers dislike, plus new competitors launching on Product Hunt.
CostLogic: AI-powered construction takeoffs, estimates, and invoices
Launched on Product Hunt 114 upvotes, 2026-08-16
QuoteForge: Generate precise construction estimates.
Launched on Product Hunt 5 upvotes, 2025-10-31
Scout Out: AI generated proposals for residential construction projects
Launched on Product Hunt 72 upvotes, 2026-01-27
Construction Estimating Software: 20 top sellers on G2. Customers dislike most: Improvement Needed, Missing Features, Access Limitations, Learning Curve.
Autodesk Forma (formerly Autodesk Construction Cloud): 4.4 stars from 5,666 reviews; disliked for Missing Features, Limitations
Procore: 4.6 stars from 4,347 reviews; disliked for Learning Curve, Missing Features
HCSS: 4.6 stars from 264 reviews; disliked for Missing Features, Access Limitations
STACK Takeoff & Estimate: 4.5 stars from 94 reviews; disliked for Missing Features, Improvement Needed
No evidence found yet for: Paid tasks, Success stories, Creator patterns, Product sunsets, Compliance needs, Search trends.