Estim8 Pro is in beta. Here's what it does, and what I need from you.

I've spent the better part of a year building an estimating app for contractors, and today I'm handing it to the people it's for.

Estim8 Pro is in beta as of this week, on the App Store and Google Play. If you price residential work for a living, I'd like you to break it.

The problem I was trying to solve

I come from the jobsite side. I've watched good contractors lose jobs because the takeoff took three nights and the other guy got a number to the customer on day one. I've watched better contractors win the job and lose the margin, because forty-dollar line items nobody counted showed up at closeout.

The tools that fix this exist. They cost a few thousand dollars a year, they assume you have an estimator on staff, and they assume you're sitting at a desk with a 27-inch monitor. Most of the contractors I know are standing in a driveway with a phone.

So that was the brief: a takeoff you can do from your phone, in minutes, that doesn't miss the small stuff.

What the beta does

You snap a photo of each sheet in the plan set, or upload the PDF. Up to 25 pages.

Estim8 reads the set. Not one sheet at a time, the set. It maps the sheet index, pulls dimensions off the plans, reads the window, door, and framing schedules, and counts quantities across the whole thing. Studs, plates, sheathing, drywall, doors, windows, roofing, the works.

Then it turns those counts into a priced estimate. Materials, labor, and a cost breakdown, organized by phase, with overhead and profit and contingency built in. You can adjust any line. You can export the whole thing to a PDF you'd actually hand to a customer.

The part I'm proudest of is under the hood. Estim8 doesn't price materials, it prices assemblies. When it counts a wall, it knows the wall is studs, plates, sheathing, fasteners, house wrap, insulation, drywall, mud, tape, and paint. That's the difference between a number that looks right and a number that holds up.

What it doesn't do yet

It's a beta, so let me be straight about the edges.

It's tuned for residential and light commercial. Feed it a hospital and it will try, and it will be wrong.

Blurry photos give blurry counts. The camera screen tells you when a sheet isn't readable, but it can't fix a shot taken in a truck at dusk.

Pricing is regional, but the regional data gets better with every job that runs through it. Early on, it will be closer in some markets than others. That's part of why I need beta users spread out.

And there's a feature I'm not shipping in the beta that I'm very excited about. More on that at launch.

What I need from you

Run a job you've already priced. That's the whole ask.

Pick something you bid recently, where you know what the real number turned out to be. Put the plans through Estim8 and compare. Then tell me where it missed. Which line items were wrong, which were missing, which were counted twice. The specifics matter more than the overall impression.

Every email goes to me directly at info@dvcapps.ai. I read all of them. The ones that say "it's great" are nice. The ones that say "it missed the drywall corner bead on the second floor" are the ones that make the product better.

How to get in

Download Estim8 Pro from the App Store or Google Play. Your first full plan takeoff is on me. If you want to keep going after that during the beta, email me and we'll sort it out.

If you know a contractor who does their takeoffs at the kitchen table at 10pm, send them this.

Thanks for reading. Now go break it.

Justin Van Wie is the founder of DVC Apps, maker of Project Proctor and Estim8 Pro.