The grind: Incomplete drawings, 1,000‑page spec books, and manual alternates keep commercial estimators late at the office.
Makeoff’s promise: Parse the plans, reveal the pricey omissions, match every line to live vendor pricing, then build cost‑effective alternates in seconds.
Big win: Hours shaved between take‑off and summary, tighter pricing on fast‑turn tenant‑improvement (TI), mixed‑use, and light‑industrial bids. Find missed items fast.
Best fit: Contractors bidding multiple commercial projects per week: office TI, mixed‑use, warehouses, retail refreshes, who live inside McCormick today.
A week before this demo, Erin asked herself: “Surely AI should be doing something for me by now.” Paige connected her with Makeoff, whose promise isn’t to reinvent ConEst, it’s to pull all your bid docs together and make sense of it.Makeoff’s differentiator: it “thinks” through materials and notes, ranking what matters by financial severity and generating VE alternates on command.
Teams face mounting pressure when precision meets tight deadlines. As Mike puts it, "Miss one line in those specs and profit evaporates" – a reality that underscores how costly specification errors can be in competitive bidding environments.
The situation becomes even more problematic when value engineering alternates need complete rebuilding before bid day, destroying the momentum teams have worked hard to build.
While counting devices and materials might seem straightforward, the real time drain comes from calculating extensions and generating comprehensive summaries, tasks that continue to consume hours of valuable pre-bid time when every minute counts toward submission deadlines.
“Drawings are half‑finished; we end up taking the same job off three times.”
– Brad
