About InstaBid
InstaBid is estimating software for the guy doing the work. It turns a job you walked into a real itemized bid — your prices, your markup, your name on it — in about two minutes.
It exists because I needed it and nobody would build it.
Who’s behind it
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John Dudley — thirty years a general contractor.
I’ve bought the material, hung the drywall, eaten the change orders and run crews. I could walk a job and know the number in two minutes; what I couldn’t do was face the eight-hour write-up afterward.
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I co-host Around the House
a home-improvement show on 170+ stations with over a million listeners a week. Thirty years of straight talk about building, pricing, and running the business.
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I’m not a software guy who researched contractors.
I’m the customer. I bought the three-thousand-dollar industry standard in 2004 and never got it out of the box.
- 30years a general contractor
- 170+radio stations
- 1M+listeners a week on Around the House
What we believe
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The estimate should cost you two minutes, not an evening.
Everything else here follows from that.
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Your price is yours.
The engine hands you cost. Your markup goes on top and it’s nobody’s business but yours. We take zero percent of your job — not a percentage, not a lead fee.
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We don’t sell materials, so we can’t be lying to you about them.
That’s not a promise about our character, it’s a fact about how the business is built, and it’s the version you should trust.
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Nothing goes to your customer until you say so.
Every number is visible and editable before it moves. A wrong number can’t reach a homeowner unless you sent it.
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The little guy is the reference customer.
This industry builds for the forty-truck operation with a purchasing department, because that’s where the contract value is. Nobody builds for the guy running $150,000 a year with a helper and a truck. That guy is better at his trade than most of the people selling him software are at theirs, and he’s the one getting buried. This is for him.
How we know the numbers hold
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The catalog is hand-walked, not scraped.
Real prices argued over line by line by somebody who has stood at the counter and bought the material.
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Every price ran a gauntlet
two separate four-seat AI councils, four different models in each, so no single model’s blind spot survives. Plus an independent research agent, plus market research, plus thirty years of knowing what things actually cost.
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Once a price is ruled, the database physically refuses to change it.
Not a policy — code.
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And it re-checks itself every day.
230+ fully scoped estimates re-run automatically across eleven trades, plus a separate drift check against live production every morning. We go hunting for our own mistakes daily.
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Every code change runs a 1,916-test battery
7,901 assertions, zero failures. That’s not a marketing number; it’s what has to pass before anything ships.
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Then, on top of all of it: you can edit every field.
That’s the real backstop, and it’s the one that matters.
The part I’ll be straight about
This isn’t finished, and I’m not going to pretend it is.
There are trades I want to be deeper in. There’s a feature list I’m still working through. You will find something that’s wrong.
I’d rather say that now than have you find it in week two and feel lied to — because this whole business rests on you being able to hand my number to a homeowner and defend it. If I ever break that, none of the rest matters.
Where we are
We’re small and bootstrapped and moving fast. That’s a choice, and it’s why an early adopter gets my actual cell number instead of a support queue.
Stop losing jobs to paperwork.
Walk the job, talk it out, and a real itemized estimate goes to your customer in about two minutes. Early adopters get their first 90 days free.
Claim an early-adopter spot →