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Why contractor-bid

Every AI construction tool chases takeoff measurement or the GC-side invite blast. Nobody owns the specialty subcontractor's receiving side: the hours of PDF shuffling between "you're invited to bid" and "I can actually price this."

contractor-bid owns that gap. It is the bid-setup tool for commercial subcontractors. It gets you from bid invite to a reviewable, source-backed package in under an hour, on your own machine, without uploading a single plan sheet to anyone's cloud.

The problem it solves

A commercial bid invite arrives with hundreds of plan pages, a project manual, addenda, and a due date. Before you can price a single unit of work, someone has to figure out which pages are yours, pull the relevant spec sections, scaffold a takeoff, and watch for scope that drifted in from adjacent trades. That is an afternoon gone, per bid, before estimating even starts.

contractor-bid turns that messy bid folder into a source-backed package:

  • Your scope pages isolated into a bookmarked packet
  • Spec sections pulled and packaged
  • A takeoff workbook scaffolded from JSON you approve
  • Scope-drift and missed-addenda alerts raised in ALERTS.md
  • A supplier sendoff zipped and ready

What makes it different

Your plans never leave your machine. contractor-bid is a local-first CLI and optional stdio MCP server. There is no hosted service, no telemetry, and no upload step. The core is MIT-licensed, so your IT department can read every line. See Security.

AI that cannot invent your numbers. The model reads, classifies, summarizes, and drafts. Deterministic code writes every quantity, from JSON you approved, tied to a source page. Two human review gates are built into the pipeline on purpose. If a number is in the workbook, you can prove where it came from.

Built by a working estimator. 37 years in construction: master plumber, journeyman electrician, founded and sold a homebuilding company, currently estimating commercial fence. The tool runs on real bids before any release.

Works with what you already run. Bluebeam, Excel, email. contractor-bid handles the hours before takeoff and the hour after: triage, scope, alerts, sendoff. It feeds your measurement workflow instead of replacing it.

What it will not do

  • It will not price the job. Pricing is your judgment.
  • It will not measure drawings. Use your existing takeoff workflow for that.
  • It will not guess quantities. It refuses to, by design.

Who it is for

  • Specialty subcontractors in any CSI division (starter profiles cover Divisions 03 through 33)
  • Estimators who want AI help but need every number to trace to a source page
  • Anyone who cannot, or should not, upload GC documents to a cloud AI tool

Ready to try it? Start with Install and the Quick Start.