Construction software you own
You buy it once, install it on hardware you already have, and it's yours after that. Your drawings and your job numbers stay in the building. There's no account to make, and no cloud for me to shut off later.
I estimate structural steel in Pueblo. A few years back our office was paying monthly for three separate programs, and every one of them wanted our drawings sitting on somebody else's server. I asked one vendor who else could read them and never got a straight answer.
So I started writing our own. You buy it once and it runs on a machine in your shop. If I go under, your copy keeps working, which is the part I could never get any of them to put in writing.
Takeoff came first because that's the job I do all day. It won't be the only one.
Pueblo, Colorado
Thirty-five seconds on a real set
Opening a set, measuring off the sheet at the drawn scale, and the markups landing on the shop list. No narration, nothing sped up.
What this is for
A contractor will own half a million dollars of equipment outright and then rent the software that keeps the record of what it built. Per seat, per month, with no end to it. Stop paying and the drawings your estimators marked up are behind a login you don't have anymore.
For a fifteen-person shop that is a bad trade, and it's most of what's on offer. This is built the other way round. You pay once, it runs on hardware you already have, and anything you put in comes back out in formats other programs can read. A shop that size should be able to run a serious operation without renting its own history back from anybody.
What I make
Same rules for all of it. Your hardware, your data, paid for once.
Excalibur View
Out now. Open a set, measure off it, and the cut list and tonnage at the end trace back to what you clicked. Free for one person, Office for the rest of the shop.
What View doesExcalibur Citadel
Early access. Bids, drawings, RFIs, daily reports, contracts and a portal for your subs, sitting on your server instead of one you rent.
What Citadel doesWhat's next
The rest of the jobs I do every week. What gets built first is whatever the people using this say is hurting worst, so if you want a say in the order, tell me.
Tell me what you needWhere your data actually goes
Every destination the software can reach, out of the box. If you find one that isn't on this list, tell me.
I never receive your files, so there is nothing at my end to breach, subpoena or lose. That's also why there isn't going to be a cloud version, however often I get asked for one.
Releases ship with a SHA-256 you can check before you install. Licenses are signed files your own server reads offline. Markups stay ordinary PDF, so if I got hit by a truck tomorrow your work still opens in whatever you switch to.
Who it's for
Offices that spend the day in drawing sets and would rather not spend it in a browser tab.
Fabricators and erectors
Steel takeoff off your own chests, with a cut list and a tonnage at the end. This is the one I built first, since it's the work I do.
Subcontractors
Measure and bid off the same set the GC sent you, without needing a seat on their system or leaving your numbers sitting on it.
General contractors
Citadel keeps the whole job on hardware you control: bids, RFIs, dailies, contracts and the subs.
Defense and secure work
Sealed runs with no outbound connection at all, for shops with contract language about where data may sit.
Put it on your own drawings
Free for one person, no account, no time limit. Open a set you already priced and see whether the numbers land where you expect them to.