Works With Any Supplier
You’ve already got a guy.
The lumber yard where they know your name. The supply house where you’ve got a real account, a real number, and a counter guy who’ll hold something for you until Thursday. Maybe it took you fifteen years to build that. Maybe your dad built it before you.
InstaBid doesn’t touch any of it.
We price the job against what your supplier actually charges you. Then your full material list comes out the other end, trade-grouped and ready to pull, so you can hand it straight to your guy.
No forced account. No captive catalog. No switching to somebody else’s shelf because the software said so.
Why every other tool wants to pick your supplier
Ask yourself a simple question about any estimating tool: who pays for it?
If a tool is owned by somebody who sells materials, that tool has exactly one reason to exist — to move their material. The pricing will be their pricing. The catalog will be their catalog. The “recommended product” will be the one with the best margin for them, not the best price for you.
That’s not a conspiracy and nobody’s hiding it. It’s just what happens when the company doing the math also owns the shelf.
We don’t sell you materials. We never will. Which means we have no reason on earth to tell you a number that isn’t the real one. That’s not a promise about our character — it’s a fact about our business model, and it’s the version you should trust.
What “your price” actually means
Three layers, and you’re on top of all of them.
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1. A real baseline.
25,533 hand-walked prices across the trades — parts and labor, regionally adjusted, argued over line by line by somebody who’s actually stood at the counter and bought the material. Current retail pricing, refreshed daily, so you’re never quoting off last spring’s numbers.
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2. Your supplier’s numbers.
You bring your own account. You’ve got pricing you negotiated over years — that’s yours, and the estimate should know it.
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ABC Supply is wired and working right now — 335,957 materials.
If you’ve got an ABC account, you connect it and your own pricing flows straight into your estimates. Not a roadmap item. Done.
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Ferguson is next
, and more behind it. We’ll keep adding the houses contractors actually buy from — and we’ll never make you switch to one of them.
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3. Your override wins. Permanently.
Type in what you actually pay for a bundle of shingles and that number wins from then on. Not for that job — forever. Every reseed, every update, every price refresh: your number stands. That’s not a setting we’re nice about. The database physically refuses to overwrite a price you’ve ruled.
The engine’s job is to hand you cost. What you make on top is your business and none of ours. We take zero percent of your job.
- 25,533hand-walked prices in the catalog
- 335,957ABC Supply materials, connected today
- 0%of your job that we take
The pull list, ready to go
Job gets approved. Your full material list is right there — clean, trade-grouped, the actual quantities, in the order the counter would pick it.
Download it as a spreadsheet and send it to your guy. Same list you’d have spent an hour building by hand at the kitchen table, already done.
We don’t email your supplier for you and we don’t get in the middle of that relationship. It’s your account and your counter guy — the list just shows up finished instead of being one more thing you owe the evening.
And the quantities are honest. Pack goods bill by the whole unit — 397 feet of copper is 40 sticks, not 397 feet — because you’re buying sticks, and an estimate that pretends otherwise is quietly eating your margin on every job.
What this is really about
Software wants to own you. Every platform in every industry is running the same play: get you dependent on their catalog, their network, their pricing, and then raise the rent once leaving is too expensive.
I’ve watched it happen to contractors for thirty years. First it’s free. Then it’s essential. Then it’s expensive, and by then all your history is inside it.
The relationships you’ve built — your supplier, your subs, your customers — are the actual business. Not the software. You built those and they should stay yours.
We’re a calculator with good manners. We do the math, we get out of the way, and if you left tomorrow you’d take your prices and your suppliers with you, because they were never ours to hold.
Every price editable. Your markup, always. Zero percent to us. See how it works →
Your supplier. Your price.
Bring your own account and your own numbers. Every price editable, your markup on top, zero percent to us.
Claim an early-adopter spot →