MeasurePad
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For UK groundworks estimators

A priced first-draft BOQ, built on your own rates, ready for review in a few minutes.

Upload the tender pack. Claude Opus 4.7 reads the documents, applies your historical rates, and produces a priced BOQ in the structure the client asked for. You review, edit any line, and approve. Every approved job sharpens the rates the next one gets priced on.

Start a 14-day trial See the maths

Free for 14 days. No card. Three included estimates.

A priced estimate for a depot drainage refurbishment, showing 10,815 pounds total across three trade sections, six line items, and nine flagged assumptions.
The output. A source-mapped priced BOQ. Section headings preserved, every line with quantity, unit, rate, and total, every number validated before it reaches your screen.

The arithmetic

The maths of an estimator's week.

Pricing a commercial groundworks tender from scratch is two to three days of work. If your day rate is £400, one tender costs you between £800 and £1,200 of your own billable time before the client has so much as opened the email.

MeasurePad is £249 a month. About five hours of estimator time.

A typical job priced through MeasurePad is a couple of hours of review instead of two or three days of pricing. If you price two tenders a month, the software pays for itself on the first tender of the first month. Everything after that is hours back on your calendar, or hours billable to something else.

Typical day rate

£350 to £500

UK freelance groundworks estimator, 2026

Hours per tender, from scratch

16 to 24

Commercial groundworks, multi-trade

Your time saved per tender

12 to 18 hours

Review only, no re-pricing

Cost of MeasurePad per month

£249

Roughly half a day of billable time

Pay for a month of the software by saving five hours on one tender. Then spend the rest of the month profiting from it.

Your numbers

Plug in your own figures.

The arithmetic above uses sensible averages. Your practice isn't an average. Slide the inputs to match what you actually do and the numbers update live.

Hours saved per year

374

Gross value of that time

£18,700

Net after the £2,490 annual plan

£16,210

That's roughly 47 extra billable days a year.

Assumes roughly three hours of review per tender once MeasurePad has priced it and your rate library is seeded. First few tenders will save less while you learn the flow. Hours converted to pounds at an eight-hour day.

How it works

What it actually does.

You upload the tender pack. PDFs, Word documents, the client's Excel BOQ. MeasurePad reads the structured rows where structure exists, and the prose where it doesn't.

Every job has an instructions box for the idiosyncrasies. A rate override you want applied only this once. A section to skip. A scope narrowing the pack doesn't make obvious. Say it in plain English before you press Generate. “Only price the drainage.” “Use £85 per cubic metre for C30 concrete on this job.” “Ignore section C, the client is pricing prelims separately.” Claude reads the instructions first and treats them as directions, not suggestions.

A job header showing the Instructions for Claude panel populated with: only price the drainage section, use 85 pounds per cubic metre for C30 concrete, ignore the prelims.
The instructions box. Plain-English directions the model reads before it reads the documents. Lives on the job, so regenerating preserves them; one-off overrides stay out of the permanent rate library.
The MeasurePad dashboard showing two approved jobs: Depot Drainage Refurb and Commercial Unit, Phase 1.
The dashboard. One card per job. Status badge, trade type, document count, last update.

Claude walks the scope, picks the right rate from your library for each item, and writes a priced BOQ in the same section structure the client sent. Arithmetic is validated in code before anything reaches your screen. Line totals match quantity times rate. Section totals match their line items. The grand total matches the sections. If the model produces a mathematically inconsistent estimate, the validator corrects it programmatically and logs it. Nothing inconsistent is ever stored.

A priced estimate showing three trade sections (Preliminaries, Earthworks, Drainage) with line items, rates, and matched rate-schedule notes.
The output. Source section headings preserved. Every line carries a note about where the rate came from, whether that's a match to your schedule or a market-rate estimate with an uncertainty flag.

You review at your own pace. Every cell edits inline. Totals recalculate as you type.

If you change your mind mid-review, you don't start over. A Revise button sits next to Save Changes; click it and you get a prompt box where you describe what should change. “Add a £2,000 scaffolding allowance.” “Reduce all groundworks rates by five per cent.” “Delete the Contingency section.” The revision is a fraction of the cost of a fresh run because the documents stay put; only the rows you asked about are touched, and the manual edits you've already made to other lines are preserved.

The Revise dialog open over an estimate. A textarea with the prompt 'Add a 2,000 pound scaffolding allowance to Preliminaries', plus a list of further example instructions.
Revise. A plain-English prompt for changes that should apply across the estimate. Uses the current estimate as context, so it's faster and cheaper than a fresh run, and every row you haven't mentioned stays exactly as you left it.

When you approve, the approved line items flow back into your rate library. Descriptions that describe the same work collapse into one canonical rate, so you don't end up with five different versions of “50mm concrete blinding”. The library learns the shape of your pricing over time.

The rate library, showing ten canonical rates across six UK groundworks trade categories, each with a sample count indicating how many jobs it has been reinforced in.
The rate library. Sample counts next to each rate show how many approved estimates have reinforced it. More samples, more confidence.

If the client sent you an Excel spreadsheet to price, you get that spreadsheet back with just the Rate column populated. The formulas in the Total column recalculate when the file opens. The client sees their own document, in their own format, with your prices. No format wars with the QS.

Pricing

One product. Two ways to pay for it.

Both plans include unlimited estimates, unlimited jobs, a personal rate library that learns as you approve, PDF and Excel exports, filled-spreadsheet export, and email support from the person who built it. No per-seat charges, no hidden tiers.

Monthly

£249/month

Billed monthly. Cancel any time.

Start with monthly

Works out to roughly five hours of billable estimator time per month. Break-even on the first tender you price through it.

Best value

Annual

£2,490/year

Billed upfront for the year. Two months effectively free.

Start with annual

About a week of billable estimator time, once a year. One or two tenders priced through it earns that back.

Every subscription starts with a fourteen-day free trial. Three estimates included. No card required to try.

Questions

Things estimators have asked so far.

What if the AI picks a wrong rate?
You review every line before you approve. Edit any cell inline, or use Revise to describe the change in plain English if you want the same correction applied across several rows at once. Uncertainty flags appear on any line where the rate didn't come straight from your schedule. Nothing gets sent to a client until you've seen every number.
Can I tell it what to include or exclude for a specific job?
Yes. Every job has an instructions box that takes plain-English directions. “Only price the drainage.” “Use £85 per cubic metre for C30 concrete on this one.” “Ignore the prelims, the client is pricing those separately.” Claude reads the instructions before it reads the documents, so they override any assumption it would otherwise make from the pack. The instructions live on the job, so regenerating keeps them, and one-off rate overrides stay out of your permanent library.
Do I have to give up my existing rate library?
No. You can seed the library by adding rates manually, you can grow it by approving estimates, or you can do both. Manual rates are never overwritten by an automatic import, ever.
What happens to the documents I upload?
They're encrypted in transit and at rest, stored in the EU, and used only to price your estimates. They're not used to train AI models, and that's contractual with our model provider. Full detail in the privacy policy.
Am I locked in?
No. Monthly is genuinely monthly — cancel any time from inside your account, effective at the end of your current billing period. Annual is paid upfront for the year. Fourteen-day free trial first, with no card, so you can tell whether it actually fits your flow before the clock starts.
What file types can I upload?
PDF, Word (.docx), and Excel (.xlsx). Scanned PDFs with no extractable text upload fine but can't be priced. The system warns you at upload time rather than after a wasted estimate run.
Does it work on mobile?
It works in a mobile browser for review and light editing. Most real pricing work happens on desktop. Mobile is handy for checking something on a train.
How is this different from just pasting into ChatGPT?
Generic chatbots don't know your rates, don't keep a library, don't preserve the client's Excel format, don't validate the arithmetic, don't learn from your approvals, and aren't accountable to UK measurement standards. The model is a component of the product. The product is the discipline surrounding it.
Who built this?
One person. UK-based. Built it because pricing tenders from scratch every time is a lousy way to spend two days of a week. Support emails come from that person, not a ticketing system.

Stop pricing from scratch.

Fourteen-day trial, three estimates, no card. If you price one tender through MeasurePad and hate it, no harm done. If you price one and it saves you a day, you'll know why this exists.

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