COSTING
Drawings in. Numbers out. Your estimator in charge.
Every job starts with the same question — what will this cost? — and answering it well has always meant hours of a senior estimator’s time — or days of waiting on an outside service. Blackfrog’s costing platform changes the speed, not the standard: AI reads the drawings and documents, deterministic code does the measuring and the math, and your estimator reviews and approves every line before a number goes out the door. Accurate, faster, and easy enough to use that it actually gets used. Product costing or job costing, residential or commercial — the discipline is the same.
01 / RESIDENTIAL TAKEOFF
The takeoff that used to wait a week.
A high-end residential painting contractor came to us with a familiar bottleneck: every bid on a luxury home started with a takeoff, and the takeoff meant sending the drawing set out and waiting five to seven days for quantities to come back. We built a system that reads the full architectural set — floor plans, finish schedules, fixture counts — and returns per-room takeoff quantities the estimator reviews, edits, and prices. On a 47-page set for a roughly 37,000-square-foot residence, the largest scope item landed within about 1% of the estimator’s own manual takeoff — and when the estimator priced it, the system reproduced their own interior bid to 97.5%. That’s the Mirror Test — before anyone trusted the system with a new bid, it had to hand the estimator back numbers they already knew were true. Never confuse the machine being impressive with the machine being right; this platform was built around that rule. The week of waiting is gone. The judgment never left the building.
Reads the full drawing set
Room-by-room quantities
Estimator approves every line
<15 min
to per-room takeoff quantities on a 47-page set —
formerly a 5–7 day outsourced wait
97.5%
of the estimator’s own priced
interior bid, reproduced
blackfrog / takeoff review — room by room
[ PRODUCT SHOT —
takeoff review ]
blackfrog / budget engine — 21 divisions
[ PRODUCT SHOT —
budget engine ]
02 / COMMERCIAL BUDGETS
A defensible budget while the deal is still warm.
For a commercial general contractor in the Mid-Atlantic, the cost of a credible early budget — hours of senior-estimator time per inquiry — forced a bad choice: turn early-stage deals away, or burn expert hours on projects that might never close. Now the drawings go in and a full line-item budget comes out, priced across all 21 CSI divisions on every run. The rates aren’t from a published cost book — they’re rate tables built from the estimator’s own historical bids, then benchmarked against a market range so an off-the-rails number never goes out looking authoritative. Two modes cover the whole conversation: a detailed proposal for bidding, and a clearly-labeled feasibility band for the first phone call.
All 21 CSI divisions
Your own historical rates
Market-benchmarked, always
<2 min
to a first-pass, line-item budget — work that
used to take the better part of a day
−0.2%
aggregate variance vs. the estimator’s own
six sealed bids on the calibrated sector
/ HOW IT WORKS
The AI is the first guess. Your estimator is the last word.
01
Upload the drawings.
Floor plans, finish schedules — full sets, multiple sheets at once, full resolution. No downscaling, no pre-processing on your end.
02
The AI reads the plans and shows its work.
A vision model extracts the scope — areas, room and fixture counts, finish levels — and grades its own confidence on every field. Anything ambiguous is flagged for a person to confirm, not guessed at.
03
Your estimator confirms the scope.
Every field is editable, and nothing is priced until a person has reviewed what the machine read. The system amplifies your estimator’s judgment; it never bypasses it.
04
A calibrated engine prices the job.
Deterministic code prices the confirmed scope from rate tables built out of your own historical bids — then benchmarks the result against a market range so an outlier never leaves the building looking authoritative.
Both engagements on this page are real, paid client work — anonymized at each firm’s request, with every number documented in the engagement records, not projected. No staff displaced: on both, the estimator reviews every field the AI fills, and final pricing stays with the estimator’s judgment. Read the residential engagement → · Read the commercial engagement → · All case studies →
Your drawings already hold the number. Get it in minutes.
Bring a real drawing set — the last job you bid, or the one sitting on your desk right now. We’ll run it through the platform and put the output next to your own numbers, line by line, so you can judge it the way an estimator should: against the work.
Practical AI for small and mid-sized business. Working products, verified numbers, and your experts in charge of every decision.