Software you can run, read and keep
Everything I make runs on hardware you own. Your drawings, bids and job records stay where you put them, and I never get a copy of any of it.
Why I build it this way
The files a contractor keeps are worth more than most of what's in the yard. Old bids, signed contracts, and the marked-up drawings that are usually the only record of what anybody thought the job was when it got priced.
Most of it now sits on somebody else's server under terms that get rewritten at renewal. I asked a vendor once who could read our drawings and got back a paragraph about industry-leading encryption, which doesn't answer the question I asked.
So the software comes to your office instead. It runs on your hardware and answers to you, you can read the code that touches your files, and if I disappear tomorrow what you bought keeps running with your data still readable.
I'm Creede Guardamondo. I estimate and run structural steel jobs in Pueblo, Colorado. These get built around how the work gets done in an office of six, which is the office I'm sitting in.
The rules everything follows
Self-hosted
Runs on your computers and your server, inside your network. There is no Excalibur cloud to sign in to.
I hold nothing
Your drawings, markups, bids and records never reach me. No analytics, no usage tracking, no crash reports either.
Read every line
You should be able to see what the software does with your files, and the person who signs off on it should be able to check rather than take my word. The app and the Office server are both published, under the Elastic License 2.0. Read them, change them, build them yourself. Licence and source.
Bought, not rented
Pay once. Updates are optional, and the version you own keeps working whether or not you buy more.
Open formats
Markups stay ordinary PDF. Takeoff exports to Excel, CSV and JSON. Every app has a documented API.
Numbers you can trace
Every quantity comes from something a person clicked on. If a value is missing it says so rather than filling in a guess.
What I'm building
Each one works on its own, and they're meant to sit on the same server and talk to each other.
| App | What it does | Where it is |
|---|---|---|
| Excalibur View | Drawings, markup and takeoff on Windows and macOS, with an Office server for the rest of the shop | Out now |
| Excalibur Citadel | Project management for GCs: bids, drawings, RFIs, daily reports, contracts and a sub portal | Early access |
| The rest | Estimating, fabrication management and field tools, on the same rules | Being built |
What I won't do
- Keep your drawings or records on a server of mine
- Track how you use the software
- Switch off something you bought because you stopped paying for updates
- Push an update into your office without your say
- Let anything draw on your drawings without a person clicking to accept it
- Sell, share or mine your job data, because I never have it in the first place
Tell me what your office needs
What gets built next is decided by the people using this. If something's missing, write and say so. That's how most of it got here.