ScanToScopeStart freeRemote estimating
Remote estimating software, and the part page one leaves out
Search for remote estimating software and you get nine pages of remodeling estimating software. Good tools, most of them. Not one of them tells you how the room gets measured when you are not standing in it.
No card. Nothing for the homeowner to install.
What everybody means by remote, and what you mean
There are two different things hiding in that search. Software vendors hear remote and think cloud. You open the estimate on a laptop at the kitchen table, the office sees it at the same time, the file is not sitting on one computer in a drawer. That is real, it is useful, and it is also what every tool in this category has done for about ten years.
What a remodeler means is simpler. Can I price this job without driving forty minutes to look at a bathroom. That is the question, and page one does not answer it anywhere.
One of the bigger names ranking right now is built openly around the in home appointment. Its own copy talks about what the rep needs before leaving the home. Another describes itself as cloud based so you can work from any device with internet access, which is about where the software runs, not about whether you had to show up. A third names a way to import exterior measurements from another vendor and a way to sketch a floor plan over an uploaded image, and never says where that image came from or who had to be there to get it.
So the honest summary of that page one is this. Every tool on it will let you build the estimate anywhere. Every one of them assumes somebody already measured.
The measuring problem nobody on page one touches
Strip the job down and a remote estimate needs three things that only exist at the house.
Nothing in the software column solves any of the three, because they are not software problems. They are problems about who is standing in the room.
- Dimensions you would stake a price on, not a guess off a photograph
- Eyes on the parts that move the number, the subfloor, the vent, the window in the wet wall
- Enough of a record that you can defend the quote in six weeks when somebody says that is not what we agreed
How a remote estimate actually gets made
You send one link
A text or an email with a link in it. No account for her to make, no app from the store, nothing to install. That last part matters more than it sounds, because every tool that sends a homeowner to a store page loses most of them there.
She walks the room with her own phone
On a recent iPhone Pro the phone measures the room with LiDAR while she walks it. On any other phone it falls back to photographs plus the room sizes typed in. Photos go up one at a time as she takes them, so a bad signal in a basement costs you one picture instead of the whole submission.
The scope comes back written
A vision model reads her photographs and a model writes the scope brief from what is in them. You get a written scope and a set of renders made from the images, not a folder of twenty pictures to sort out yourself.
You price it against your book
The number is arithmetic against your own cost book, line by line. No model guesses at it. You read the scope, adjust what needs adjusting, and the quote goes out that evening.
The drive out and the sent link
| Drive out and measure | Send the link | |
|---|---|---|
| Time before you can quote | Travel both ways plus an hour in the house | However long she takes to walk the room |
| Who has to be free at once | You and the homeowner | Nobody. She does it when she gets home. |
| What you have afterward | A notepad and your memory | Dimensions, photographs, a written scope and renders |
| Jobs you can look at in a day | Three if they are close together | As many as send one back |
| Cost of looking at a job you do not want | Half a day and the fuel | One scan |
Some jobs still need the drive. A whole house gut, anything structural, anything where you need to be in the crawlspace yourself. The point was never to stop going out. It is to stop going out blind.
Where the number comes from
Worth being precise about, because this whole category is loose with it right now.
A vision model reads the photographs. A model writes the scope brief. An image model makes the renders. Those are models and we say so plainly.
The price is not. The price is your cost book, applied line by line to the quantities in the scope, with every quantity traceable back to where it came from. If your tile labor is one figure and the shop down the road charges another, your quote carries yours. Nobody else's average, no regional index, no national database adjusted for your zip code.
That is a smaller claim than most of this market makes, and it is the one that survives being checked.
Questions contractors ask
Does this replace my estimating software?
No, and it is not trying to. If you run Buildertrend or Joist or a spreadsheet you have had for nine years, keep it. This is the step before it, getting the room and the scope into your hands without the drive. What comes out can move into a CRM through Zapier.
What if the customer has an old Android?
It works. LiDAR measuring needs a recent iPhone Pro. Everything else falls back to photographs plus typed room sizes, which is what a lot of submissions are. You can see which path a submission came in on before you quote from it.
How accurate is a measurement somebody else took?
Good enough to quote most rooms, not good enough to order glass or cabinets from. Treat it the way you would treat a measurement from a new apprentice. Price from it, then verify the critical dimensions before anything gets ordered.
What happens when the photographs are useless?
You see them before you quote. If a submission is four dark pictures of one corner, you ask for the two you need or you drive out. The difference is that you found out at your desk instead of in her driveway.
Do scans from my own crew count against my plan?
No. A job one of your own people captures on site is not metered on any plan. That is what the seats are for.
Two scans, no card
Run it on the next two leads that come in. If the scope that comes back is not worth the drive you saved, you have lost nothing. Founding pricing is locked for as long as the account stays active and it closes on November 30.