Eddy

Estimating is where a builder’s week disappears. A takeoff by hand, counting every window, measuring every wall and room off a set of plans, takes four to eight hours for a single house, and that is before a supplier has been asked for a price. Most of those quotes are lost. The ones that are won are often won by whoever answered first.

In my interviews, sales directors and builders said the same thing in different words: quotes are lost on the scope before they are lost on the price, after hours of homework that nobody pays for. So the builders I spoke to were stuck choosing between pricing fast and pricing right. The fast quote misses the driveway or counts eight windows where the plans show nine. The careful quote arrives after the client has signed with someone else. Eddy exists to remove that trade-off: a full, checked estimate in minutes, with every question that matters asked up front.

The framing that shaped everything was that a builder should feel like they hired an outsourced estimator. Eddy has a name, a face and a voice, and it talks the way a good estimator does: it tells you what it is doing, asks when something on the plans does not add up, and says what it will assume if you are too busy to answer.

That last part is the core interaction. Every question Eddy asks carries the money at stake and a default: “The plan shows 9 windows on the east side but the schedule lists 8. Which is right? $1,900 at stake, I’ll assume 9 at 4pm.” The builder can answer in one tap, or ignore it and Eddy carries on. Questions are ranked by dollars, so the one that can move the quote most is always on top. Nothing waits on the builder unless it has to.

An estimate moves through six stages: Plans, Takeoff, Check, Price, Quote, Won. I tried a full stepper and it was crammed, so status is said once, as a sentence and a thin six-part bar: “Takeoff, step 2 of 6, then Check.” Everything Eddy makes along the way can be edited in place, and the builder’s edit always wins. Eddy never overwrites a change a person made; if the two disagree, it asks.

Builders and architects already have a language for questions on drawings, and it lives in Bluebeam: clouds, shading, callouts. Rather than invent a new one, Eddy writes its findings in that language, on the sheet, and the downloadable PDF keeps them as real, editable markups. An architect who has never heard of Eddy can open the file and know exactly what is being asked.

Under the friendly face is a pipeline built for trust. Code reads what can be read exactly: the text and vector lines of a PDF, the scale from the drawn dimensions, the area tables, the window and door schedules. Then two independent readings of the takeoff are compared, and where they disagree a third model judges. Disagreements that still matter become questions, ranked by money.

The model never does arithmetic. It decides which of the builder’s rate lines applies to which quantity, and code multiplies. Each run checks itself against sanity rules a builder would apply, and a second model takes another look at the door and window marks before the takeoff is called done. Every estimate is also checked by a person before it goes out. Alongside, I am training a plan-symbol detector, and every stage of the pipeline is swappable by config, so it can replace the current reader once it beats it on real jobs, and not before.

Eddy went live on 10 November 2026 at app.geteddy.com.au, with sign-up by invite code. A new company signs up with its ABN and lands on a home that asks for one thing: the plans. The next step is pricing real past jobs side by side with the estimators who quoted them, which is the only honest way to put an accuracy number on the site. Until then, the claim is speed, and it is a conservative one.

The most useful design decision in Eddy was letting it assume. Early flows stopped and waited on every unclear line, and a builder on site would come back to a stalled estimate and a list of questions. Giving each question a default and a deadline turned Eddy from a form that needs filling into a colleague that keeps working, and it made the builder’s attention the scarce thing the product protects.

The second was refusing to hide the working. Every price has a source, every mark can be moved, and every change says what it touched. Estimating is a trade built on judgement, and the fastest way to lose an estimator’s trust is to give them a number they cannot take apart.