A PaintScout alternative, if the five minutes was never your problem

One vendor is defending this phrase, and he is aiming elsewhere

Page one here is thinner than it looks. Capterra and GetApp on the Australian, Singapore, South African, British, New Zealand and American domains, then withorbital, serchen, a makerstack review and a painting association sponsor page. One real competitor page, from myquoteiq, and it is written for commercial painting rather than residential repaints.

So the phrase is mostly undefended, but not quite empty. What is genuinely absent is any page that asks what part of the estimate you are actually trying to speed up.

Read this bit before the rest of the page

If you came here looking for something to use instead of PaintScout, this is not it, and we would rather say so in the second paragraph than waste your afternoon.

We do not do paint takeoff. No coats. No coverage rates. No production rates in square feet per hour. No painting line items, no material lists for paint, no spread rates. PaintScout does all of that and it is built for it. We do not, we are not going to, and a page that implied otherwise would be wasting your time and ours.

What is left is one specific thing, and whether it matters to you depends entirely on how your week actually goes. If your estimates are slow because the software is slow, buy PaintScout and stop reading. If your estimates are slow because you spend three evenings a week driving to houses to look at walls, keep going.

What PaintScout is, said fairly

Their own description is estimating and sales software built specifically for painting contractors, with CRM and project management included. That specificity is the point of the product and it is why painters like it. A general contractor tool makes you bend your pricing to fit it. Theirs is already shaped like a painting business.

The estimating is production rate based. Their own feature list names production rate estimating, production rates and material lists, pre built templates, photo uploads on estimates, optional upgrades and add ons, change orders and additional work. The sales end is branded presentations, electronic signatures, and sending by email or text. Their pricing page shows a production rate calculator with adjustable square feet per hour settings, which is exactly the right way to price painting labor and exactly the thing we have no version of.

On price, read their own page rather than a directory. The sales platform is 119 dollars a month billed monthly, or 99 billed annually. Operations is a separate add on at 99 a month, or 79 annually, with team seats at 20 per user per month on top. There is a 14 day trial with no card. Onboarding is included, and there are separate success packages listed at 999, 1499 and 1999. Read on 1 November 2026. A crew running both halves of the product is a long way past the 119 headline, which is worth knowing before you compare anything on price.

Where the five minutes starts

Here is the thing we went looking for and did not find. On their home page and their pricing page, nothing says where the measurements come from.

Not a word about measuring on site. Nothing about takeoff. Nothing about typing dimensions in. The closest either page gets is that the software works on any device so you can build and send estimates from the job site, no laptop required, and a photo of a man holding a tablet.

Which tells you what the five minutes is measuring. It is the time from having the numbers to having a proposal in her inbox. That is a real five minutes and they have earned it. But the clock starts after somebody has walked the house, counted the rooms, looked at the trim, worked out which ceilings are getting done, and come back with square footage. On a 2,400 square foot repaint that walk plus the drive either side is most of an evening, and if she is getting three quotes, two of those evenings produce nothing at all.

No estimating software shortens that part, because it is not software work. It is a person in a car. The only way the hour goes away is if somebody else collects the room, and the only person already standing in the house is the customer.

That is the whole of what we do, and it is why this page exists on a site that will never do paint takeoff.

What we do for a painter, and what we will not pretend to do

You send her a link. She opens it in the browser already on her phone, with nothing to install and no account to make. On a recent iPhone Pro the LiDAR sensor measures the room. On any other phone she photographs it and types the room sizes in. Photos upload one at a time as she takes them, so a weak signal at the back of the house does not lose the batch.

What comes back is the room. Dimensions, wall and floor areas, the openings counted, and the photographs themselves, with every number labeled by where it came from so a sensor measurement is never confused with something she typed. A vision model reads the photographs and a model writes the scope brief. The price is arithmetic against your own cost book, line by line, with each quantity traceable back to the capture.

Then you are back in your own tools. The areas go into your production rates. The coats, the primer, the spread rates and the paint order are yours and PaintScout is better at all of them than anything we will ever build.

What you have saved is the drive, and the sort through. You are reading rooms at the kitchen table at eight in the evening and deciding which three of the seven calls are worth a Saturday morning.

• We measure the room. We do not calculate coats, coverage or spread rates
• No production rates, no painting line items, no paint material list
• Nothing measures from a photograph. Typed sizes are labeled as typed
• Priced against your own cost book, never a national average