Priced per bid. Not per seat.
One industrial bid costs you roughly $96,000 in estimator time before you have priced a single line. theTakeoff takes that bid from about 875 estimator-hours to about 300 - and you pay for the drawings you run, not the people who run them.
There is no rate card on this page on purpose. What you pay depends on how many drawings you actually run, and quoting a tier before we have seen your bid volume would be a guess dressed up as a number. The model is below in full. You get a real figure on the first call.
See theTakeoff on Your Own Drawings
Send a live P&ID package and get a complete, priced takeoff back in 48 hours.
Buy the modules your bid work actually needs.
theTakeoff is the estimation module inside ContraVault. The modules around it are bought independently, and for some contractors the takeoff engine is the wrong place to start. Pick where you sit.
Self-performing piping & mechanical contractor
Takeoff, end to end
The engine reads the package you receive - P&IDs, isometrics, the line list, your pipe class sheets - decodes every line number into size, class, service and insulation, counts the valves, instruments and in-line specialties, derives the gaskets and stud bolts nobody draws, flags spec breaks and contradictions across the set, then applies labor hours and prices the estimate.
Platform fee, plus the drawings you run
Sized against your annual bid volume, quoted per bid. Not per seat, not per trade licence, not per project.
See it on your drawingsModules on this stack
- Counts resolved against ASME B31.3 and B16.5, not a lookup table you maintain
- Confidence score on every extracted item
- Evidence link from every number back to the exact spot on the drawing
- Excel export in your own template
- Every estimator on your team, including the ones who only review
This is the trade the engine runs end to end today.
Structural steel fabricator or erector
Start upstream, add steel as it ships
Steel takeoff is live and early. Every sheet in the set is marked up member by member, sizes and lengths read off, weights sourced from AISC, assembled into one BOM across the whole package with a confidence value on each member. We will show you exactly where the engine is strong and where it is not, on your own drawings, before you buy it. Scope intelligence and bid levelling are mature today and carry the weight while the steel engine matures.
Platform fee, plus the drawings you run
Steel consumption is priced at a lower rate than piping while the engine is early. That is written into the agreement, not promised on a call.
See it on your drawingsModules on this stack
- Member-level takeoff with AISC-sourced weights
- Whole-set BOM, inspectable down to the individual member
- Confidence value and a review flag on every member
- Scope intelligence and bid levelling running at full strength today
- Every estimator on your team, including the ones who only review
Labor and pricing on steel are not there yet. We will say so on the call rather than after you sign.
EPC at FEED · turnaround & maintenance
Takeoff is the wrong module for you
At FEED there are no isometrics to read and often no P&IDs worth counting. On a turnaround the drawing set is thin or missing entirely. Your bottleneck is upstream and downstream of the takeoff: reading the scope out of a 900-page RFP, finding what is buried in the appendices, deciding whether to chase it at all - then getting vendor pricing back and levelled inside a short window.
Priced on scope volume, not drawing volume
We will not quote you the takeoff engine when there is nothing for it to read. Add it later, when the drawings exist.
Book a working sessionModules on this stack
- Scope and SOW analysis across the full RFP, with search that holds across appendices
- Synopsis and a structured go/no-go before you commit an estimator
- RFQ generation, vendor comparison and bid levelling
- Award-stage comparison you can defend internally
- Every estimator on your team, including the ones who only review
Both of these modules are built and running today.
The platform fee
The floor under every agreement. Access for your whole estimating group, environment, support, SSO and the security posture. It does not scale with headcount.
What you run
Reading drawings is where the compute goes, so that is what we meter - in drawing-equivalents, because a dense P&ID costs far more to read than a detail sheet. You never work in them. Every quote converts to a per-bid figure.
The knowledge layer
The standards libraries, component master and labor norms the engine reasons against - plus your own corrections, which stay yours. The difference between resolving a fitting and guessing at one.
What one bid costs you today.
Start with your own figures. The reduction ratio is ours, measured against manual line-by-line takeoff on the same drawing package. Everything else on this panel is yours.
Our benchmark for an industrial piping package is ~875.
Count the ones you actually price, not the ones you see.
Salary, burden and overhead. Most US industrial contractors land between $85 and $110.
Estimator time in one bid today, at your numbers.
Hours a year handed back to your estimating group.
Estimator cost reclaimed across the year.
What that reclaimed capacity could cover, with the team you already have.
Capacity, not wins. This is how much bid work your current estimators could carry - what you do with the headroom is a commercial decision, not a software one.
You are already paying for the takeoff. Just in estimator hours.
This is not a comparison against other software. It is a comparison against what a bid costs you right now, counted by hand, because that is the budget the platform comes out of.
| Counting it by hand | With theTakeoff |
|---|---|
| Counting it by handAn estimator opens every sheet and counts every component, one discipline at a time. | With theTakeoffThe engine reads the package and returns a draft count. Your estimator reviews it instead of building it. |
| Counting it by handGaskets and stud bolts are worked out by hand off the flange joints - 35–55% of your line items, none of them drawn. | With theTakeoffDerived from the joints automatically, and shown with the joint they came from. |
| Counting it by handA spec break halfway down a run gets missed, and shows up after award, eating the margin. | With theTakeoffRead off the P&ID and the line list, and the run repriced either side of it. |
| Counting it by handThe P&ID says one size, the line list says another. Somebody finds it on page 847, or nobody does. | With theTakeoffContradictions across drawings and specs flagged before your estimator gets there. |
| Counting it by handThe addendum lands Friday at four and the takeoff gets redone from the top. | With theTakeoffRe-run the sheets that changed. Keep the rest of the work you already signed off. |
| Counting it by handMore bid volume means more estimators, and estimators with plant experience are not on the market. | With theTakeoffSame team, more bids. The ceiling moves without a hire. |
The ones procurement asks first.
A platform fee, plus what you actually run. Consumption is metered in drawing-equivalents and quoted back to you per bid, sized against your annual bid volume. Seats are not the unit and neither are trade licences - adding an estimator, or a second trade, does not automatically add a licence fee. If you go over your commitment you keep working and the overage is billed at your contracted rate, and if your volume settles higher we reset it at renewal rather than penalising you mid-term.
Because what you pay depends on how many drawings you actually run. Publishing a tier before we have seen your bid volume would be a guess dressed up as a number, and you would end up either overpaying for headroom you do not use or renegotiating in month three. The model is set out above in full. You get a real figure on the first call, framed per bid.
About 70% of a package comes back on the first pass. We publish that instead of a rounder number, because an estimator who cannot see what the machine got wrong cannot sign the bid - and the other 30% is the entire reason the review tooling exists. Every item carries a confidence score, the queue sorts by uncertainty so your time goes where the doubt is, and every number links back to the exact spot on the drawing it came from.
No. theTakeoff is software your estimators run. Nobody at ContraVault performs takeoffs on your behalf, under any arrangement or at any price. The estimator keeps the judgment - interpreting scope, reading how it gets built, assessing the commercial risk - and signs off on every quantity. That is what makes the count defensible when someone challenges it in a bid review.
Neither. Pilots are paid, scoped to a named bid package you are actually chasing, and carry a success metric agreed in writing before they start - hours against your own baseline, or accuracy against a printed BOM you already hold. A free pilot produces free work rather than a decision, and both sides tend to learn nothing from it.
Contractors who assemble bids from sub quotes rather than estimating off engineering drawings - there is no takeoff here to automate. Building work: schools, offices, retail, healthcare. And anyone bidding a handful of jobs a year, where the economics of a platform fee do not work. We would rather say that on the first call than the third.
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