Division 01
Estimating
Built around your price book and the way you actually price. Counts in, a priced estimate out, in your format.
REPLACES: The estimating spreadsheet only one person understands.
Sheet A-001 · The case for owning
Stop renting
your software.
Agent9 builds the estimating, takeoff, RFI and project tools your company actually runs on. One fixed price. No seats, no licences, no renewals. The code is yours.
3 meetings to a fixed price · prototype $500
Since you opened this page
$0.0000
- Per day
- $62.47
- Per year
- $22,800
- Year 10
- $228,000
Example: 20 users × $95/user/month. And at the end of year ten you own nothing.
Fig. 1 · What renting looks like, live. Scroll down and it keeps going.
Read before building anything
General notes
- 1
SaaS made sense when custom software cost a fortune. It doesn't anymore. The deal changed and the invoices didn't.
- 2
Per-seat pricing taxes you for growing. Hire an estimator, and you start paying rent on another chair.
- 3
Software built for every contractor fits none of them. So you change how you work to suit the tool, and keep a spreadsheet on the side for the parts it gets wrong.
- 4
The price goes up every year. Leaving gets harder every year. That isn't an accident. It's the business model.
- 5
Your bids, your costs and your job history live in someone else's building. Try exporting ten years of it and see what comes out.
- 6
Half the features were built for a different company. You pay for all of them, every month.
- 7
AI coding tools changed the math. One experienced builder now ships what used to take a team and a year.
- 8
So build exactly what you need, once, and own it. Note 8 governs.
Run your own numbers
Rent vs own
Put in what you pay now. The orange line is the subscription, rising every year. The white line is a one-time build plus optional support.
Renting, 7 yrs
$197,312
Owning, 7 yrs
$50,200
Kept in your business
$147,112
Owning pays for itself in month 16. Everything after that is money that stays in your business, and the software keeps working.
Specifications
Scope of work
Division 02
Drawing analysis
AI that reads plan sets: sheet indexes, schedules, counts, and what changed between revisions.
REPLACES: Hours of flipping sheets to find the one that changed.
Division 03
RFIs and submittals
Log, route, chase and close, tied to your job numbers and your people.
REPLACES: The RFI log in a shared drive nobody updates.
Division 04
Project management
The dashboards your PMs would actually check, built from data you already have.
REPLACES: Monday morning status calls to find out where things stand.
Division 05
Workflow automation
The copy-paste between email, spreadsheets and accounting, done by the software.
REPLACES: Retyping the same job into four systems.
Division 06
Integrations
Your accounting, scheduling and file storage, connected, so data goes in once.
REPLACES: Exports, imports, and hoping the columns line up.
Three meetings to a fixed price
The schedule
01Intro meetingBoth
02Holding feeYou
03PrototypeAgent9
04Prototype reviewBoth
05Scope + fixed priceBoth
06BuildAgent9
07Review rounds ×3Both
08HandoverYou
IDActivity
W1W2W3W4W5W6W7W8W9W10
01
Intro meeting
Both
02
Holding fee
You
03
Prototype
Agent9
04
Prototype review
Both
05
Scope + fixed price
Both
06
Build
Agent9
07
Review rounds ×3
Both
08
Handover
You
Meeting Agent9 working Review rounds MilestoneWeeks are typical for a mid-size build, not a promise.
What you get at the end
The handover package
When the build is done, everything comes to you. If Agent9 disappeared tomorrow, your software would keep running and any developer could pick it up.
- The source code, in a repository you own
- Plain-English documentation
- Running on your accounts, under your domain
- Your data in a standard database you can export
- No licence key, no seat count, no kill switch
- Optional support you can cancel any time. The software keeps working.
YoursNo licence required
Request for information
Got a question?
Submit an RFI.
30 minutes, no slides. Bring the spreadsheet you hate most.