Terms of Service

Who these terms are between

These terms are between Get Construction Estimate and you — the contractor, subcontractor, developer or owner requesting an estimate. Where you are requesting work on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorized to do so and these terms bind that company.

They apply from the moment you use this website or send us a request, and they govern any estimating work we go on to do for you unless we sign a separate written agreement that says otherwise. Where a signed agreement and these terms conflict, the signed agreement wins.

What we provide

We provide outsourced construction estimating: quantity takeoffs measured from your drawings, and cost estimates built on those quantities. Deliverables are supplied as an editable spreadsheet alongside the marked-up plan set, quantified against CSI MasterFormat divisions, with the assumptions and exclusions stated in the estimate itself.

We do not provide architectural, engineering or design services. We do not prepare, seal or stamp construction documents, we do not perform code compliance review, and we do not act as the engineer or architect of record on any project. Nothing we deliver is a substitute for a licensed design professional.

We are not a party to your bid, your contract or your project. We produce a number and the working behind it; every commercial decision taken from that number is yours.

Quotes, scope and acceptance

Send us the plan set and we review it and reply with a flat price for the work and a delivery date, both confirmed in writing before anything begins. There is no hourly billing and no open-ended engagement.

That quote covers the scope described in it and nothing beyond it. Work starts when you accept in writing. Until you do, no charge arises and you are under no obligation.

If the drawings will not support the estimate you have asked for — because the set is incomplete, illegible, or missing the information a takeoff of that scope requires — we tell you when you ask, not after you have paid. If we cannot do the work properly we say so and decline it.

If the scope changes after acceptance, because the drawings are revised or because you add trades or detail, we re-quote the additional work and you approve it before we carry it out. We do not add charges you have not agreed to.

Your drawings, and what you confirm when you send them

When you upload a plan set you confirm that you have the right to send those documents to us and to have us work from them. Drawings frequently belong to an owner, a developer or an architect, and you may hold them under your own confidentiality agreement. Making sure your arrangement permits you to pass them to a third-party estimator is your responsibility rather than ours.

You remain the owner of everything you send. We acquire no rights in your drawings beyond what is needed to produce your estimate.

Our obligations run the other way too. Uploaded files are used for one purpose: producing the takeoff or estimate you asked for. We do not publish them, use them as portfolio examples, use them to train any machine learning system, or show them to other clients — not in anonymized form, not in part. If you need a signed non-disclosure agreement in place before you send anything, ask and we will sign one.

We work from the documents you give us. We do not visit the site, verify existing conditions, or independently confirm that the drawings reflect what is actually there. Where information is missing, the assumption we made is stated in the estimate rather than buried inside a rate.

What an estimate is, and what it is not

This is the most important section on this page, so it is worth being exact.

An estimate is a forecast of probable cost, produced from the documents available at the time, using the quantities we measured and a stated pricing basis. It is not a quotation for construction, not a guaranteed maximum price, and not a promise of what the project will finally cost.

Actual costs diverge from estimates for reasons no estimator controls. Material prices move. Subcontractor pricing depends on how badly a given firm wants the work that month. Site conditions turn out differently from what the drawings showed. Scope changes, schedules slip, and design develops after the set we measured.

Every estimate we deliver states its pricing basis and the date that basis was current, together with the assumptions, exclusions and any allowances it carries. Read them. They are the part of the document that tells you what the number does and does not include, and an estimate used without them is being used wrongly.

We do not publish an accuracy percentage and we will not give you one. An estimate is by definition not exact, and a firm quoting a figure like that is describing a level of certainty the work does not have.

Errors, revisions and putting things right

We check our work, and we still get things wrong occasionally. Where we have made a measurement or calculation error in what we delivered, tell us and we correct it. There is no charge for correcting our own mistake and no time limit invented to avoid doing so.

Revisions arising from changed drawings, added scope or a different level of detail are new work rather than corrections, and are quoted before being carried out.

If we deliver something that does not match the scope you accepted, the first remedy is that we fix it. Where that is genuinely not possible, we refund the fee for the part that was not delivered.

Fees and payment

Fees are the flat price stated in the quote you accepted. The price does not change unless the scope changes and you approve the change first.

Payment terms for your project — when payment is due, and whether any part is payable up front — are set out in the quote you accept, so they are agreed in writing before work starts rather than assumed.

Prices are exclusive of any sales tax, VAT or equivalent charge that applies in your jurisdiction.

Who owns what we deliver

Once the fee for a project is paid, the estimate and takeoff we produced for it are yours. Use them for the project they were prepared for, share them with your team, your client and your subcontractors, and incorporate them into your own bid documents.

What you may not do is resell or redistribute our deliverables as an estimating product in their own right, or present them as your own estimating service to third parties. The distinction is between using the work and reselling it.

We keep ownership of our own templates, methods and internal cost data. Nothing in a delivered estimate transfers those.

Limits on our liability

Some of what follows appears on every terms page, but it is worth stating in terms that match the actual work rather than in the abstract.

We are responsible for producing your estimate with reasonable professional care and skill. We are not responsible for the commercial outcome of decisions you take using it — whether a bid wins, whether a project is profitable, or what a subcontractor eventually charges.

Where we are liable to you for a claim connected to a project, our total liability for that project is limited to the fee you paid us for it. We are not liable for lost profit, lost bids, lost opportunity or other consequential loss.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

If something has gone wrong, tell us early. Most problems with an estimate are fixable while the bid is still open and unfixable afterwards.

Cancellation

You can cancel before work starts at no charge. After work has started, you are charged for the work completed to that point and we send you what has been produced.

We may decline a project or stop work where the drawings will not support the estimate requested, where we have reason to think you do not hold the rights to the documents supplied, or where fees agreed under these terms are unpaid.

Using this website

The content on this site — our guides, service pages and state pages — is published as general information about construction estimating. It is written carefully and reviewed, but it is general rather than project-specific, and it does not replace an estimate produced from your actual drawings or advice from a licensed professional.

Cost factors described on our state and trade pages are the conditions we see in practice. Code editions, licensing requirements, prevailing wage rules and permitting processes change and vary locally. Where a page says to verify something locally, verify it locally.

Do not use this site to upload anything you do not have the right to send, to upload malicious files, or to attempt to gain access to systems or data that are not yours.

The site is provided as it is. We keep it running and accurate to the best of our ability, but we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or free of errors.

Services we rely on

This site runs on infrastructure operated by third parties: hosting, file storage for your uploads, email delivery and live chat. They are listed by name in our privacy policy along with what each one receives. We choose them carefully and we remain responsible to you for our own work, but we do not control their systems.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the business changes. The version in force for your project is the one published when you accepted the quote, and we will not apply a later change retrospectively to work already agreed.

The date at the top of this page tells you when it was last updated.

Governing law and disputes

The governing law and the forum for any dispute are confirmed with your quote for each engagement. Where a signed agreement is in place between us, the law it names applies.

Before anything formal, raise it with us directly. Nearly everything that goes wrong on an estimate is a misunderstanding about scope or assumptions, and those are resolved in a phone call rather than in correspondence.

Contact

Questions about these terms, or about a project running under them, can be sent through the contact form at getconstructionestimate.com/contact/.

See also our privacy policy, which covers what we collect and how your uploaded drawings are handled.