Austin, TX
FOUNDATIONS ESTIMATING.

## Foundation Estimating in Austin Moves Fast — Your Bids Need To Keep Up Austin's construction market has not slowed down. New subdivisions in Pflugerville, Manor, and Kyle keep foundation contractors booked deep, and infill teardowns in East Austin and South Congress demand fast turnaround bids before the GC moves on. If you're quoting three jobs a day and hand-building each estimate in a spreadsheet, you're leaving money on the table — or leaving bids on the table altogether. Estimate.Pro gets you from a site walkthrough to a sendable bid in 8 minutes. That's the median time across foundation contractors using the platform today. --- ## Why Foundation Estimating Is Different in Austin **Expansive clay soils change everything.** Austin and the surrounding Hill Country sit on Vertisol and Austin Chalk formations. The black cotton soil common across Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties swells and shrinks with moisture, which means your scope-of-work has to account for soil prep, moisture barriers, and pier depth in ways that a generic estimating template misses. When you walk a slab job in North Austin versus a pier-and-beam repair in Hyde Park, the variables are not the same. Estimate.Pro's AI scope-of-work engine generates line items based on what you actually describe — slab-on-grade, post-tension slabs, drilled piers, pressed concrete piers, helical piers, crawl space encapsulation — so you're not manually hunting down the right template every time. **Post-tension slabs dominate new construction here.** The majority of new residential slabs in the Austin metro are post-tensioned. That means cable layout specs, stressing pocket placement, and engineer-of-record coordination show up in your bids. The platform lets you save your standard post-tension line items in your material cost workspace so they're pulled in automatically on the next PT slab quote. **Permit timelines with the City of Austin Development Services Department add days.** Foundation permits for new residential construction go through Austin DSD, and structural review adds lead time you have to account for in your project schedule and payment terms. Estimate.Pro's estimate documents include customizable terms fields so you can bake permit lead time into every bid without retyping it. --- ## AR Measurement on the Jobsite For slab area takeoffs, Estimate.Pro supports ONNX-assisted live AR measurement on supported devices. Point your phone at the slab perimeter and get a measured footprint. On unsupported devices or from photos, measurements are clearly flagged as estimates — no false precision. Either way, you're capturing dimensions on-site instead of hunting down plans back at the office. --- ## What Foundation Contractors Actually Use in Estimate.Pro - **AI scope-of-work generator** — describe the job in plain language, get a draft line-item scope. Covers slab-on-grade, pier-and-beam, drilled pier systems, foundation repair, and underpinning. - **Saved material cost workspace** — lock in your current prices for rebar, PT cables, form lumber, and concrete per cubic yard from your local supplier (Martin Marietta, Capitol Aggregates, or whoever you're running with). Reuse them across every bid. - **8-minute bid target** — walkthrough to client-ready PDF. The clock starts when you open a new project. - **Stripe Connect invoicing** — on Elite, collect deposits and progress draws directly through the estimate. Zero platform fee on Pro+. - **25 trades supported** — if you sub out waterproofing, flatwork, or site prep, those trades are in the same platform. --- ## Pricing That Makes Sense for a Foundation Crew | Plan | Cost | Platform Fee | |------|------|--------------| | Free | $0 | — | | Pro | $39/seat/mo | 3% on payments | | Elite | $79/seat/mo | 0% | | Crew | $399/mo flat | 0% | Crew is a flat monthly rate for the whole company — no per-seat math when you're adding estimators or field leads. The Free tier is free permanently. No credit card required to start. --- ## Start With Your Next Austin Foundation Bid Open a new project, describe the job — post-tension slab, drilled pier repair, whatever you're looking at — and let the AI draft the scope. You edit, price, and send. Eight minutes is the target. Most Austin foundation contractors who run the workflow the first time are at or under it by the second job.