A contractor who needs quantities off a plan set has four options: DraftTakeoff, a typical estimating service, a freelancer marketplace, or doing it in takeoff software. Here is how they differ on the things that decide it.
On your phone? Paste a link to the plan set instead of a file — any link that opens without signing in. Your drawings stay on your device until you order.
| DraftTakeoff | A typical estimating service | A freelancer marketplace | Doing it yourself with takeoff software | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price, and how it is set | One flat fee set by your drawing-sheet count, shown free before you pay and locked when you order — the fee table is below. A Trade Draft Takeoff Pack, only the trades you name, is from $149. | Typically quoted job by job. Published service rates are often about $150–400 for a small project and $400–900 for a mid-size commercial set.* | Often a fixed-price listing, roughly $15–380 a job. | Varies by product, plus your own hours. |
| First step | A free Plan Check in your browser counts your sheets and shows your fee. No account, no call, no quote request. | Typically a phone call or a quote request before you see a price for your set. | Typically you buy the listing and pay at once, then send the seller your requirements. | Varies by product. |
| Delivery time | 48 hours from when payment clears, weekends included. Rush is a 24 h delivery date for an extra 40% of the fee. | Varies. | Varies by seller. | As fast as you can measure it yourself. |
| Refunds | No reason asked until your first download. The one exception: an order whose checkout told you, before you paid, that it has no refund on request. A date we miss, a set we cannot read, or a package our checks stop is refunded in full without asking. The rules are in the Terms of Service & Refund Policy. | Varies. A full refund before you download is not typically offered. | Varies. | Varies by product. |
| How far you can check the work | Every quantity is traced to the sheet it came from, with the calculation behind it. Every line carries a grade, and a Confidence Report lists what to confirm and what the drawings did not show. | Varies. A grade or a stated assumption on every line is uncommon. | Varies by seller. | Fully — you did the measuring. |
| Who does the work | Software measures, and the result is checked against the sheets. There is no phone, chat or support inbox. | Varies. The site typically shows years of experience, a count of past projects, named customer reviews and association logos. | An individual seller, typically with buyer reviews on the listing. | You, or your own estimator. |
The three right-hand columns describe each option in general, from public websites and listings we read in October 2026. Any one provider may differ — check its own terms before you order. Where we had nothing to go on, the cell says “Varies”.
* An estimating-services firm’s published guide to takeoff service pricing (10 Jan 2026): small or residential projects under 20 pages, and mid-size commercial sets of 25 to 75 pages; standard turnaround from established providers. Vendor figures, not a survey; quotes vary by firm and scope. The same source the home page cites.
If you want a person to call, a typical estimating service usually puts a phone number at the top of its site, and a marketplace shows buyer reviews on each listing. DraftTakeoff has no phone, chat or support inbox. What you can check instead is the work itself: a full sample takeoff and the public bid record, misses published too.
Built by a project director with 25 years running multi-trade construction. Measured by software, checked against the sheets — every quantity links back to the page it came from, so you verify the work, not our credentials.
You can, and for a first look it does well. We tested it on four public bid sets — a post-frame addition, a renovation addendum, a six-trade senior center and a wastewater project, 6 to 56 drawing sheets — giving a chat AI the same PDFs our system read, byte for byte, and running three of the four on the same AI model our system reads drawings with. It listed 46 to 121 items in 2 to 23 minutes, and most of its main counts and areas (slab concrete, light fixtures, diffusers, floor drains) landed within about 5%. It also caught two things our system got wrong, pier excavation and lintels over openings, and both are now in our checks.
What a contractor runs into when they do it themselves, each seen in that test:
Scored only where an independent judge could settle it — the engineer’s bid quantities, tag counts read from the PDF text, and the drawings themselves — our system had 26 right, 6 wrong and 0 invented; the chat AI had 23 right, 9 wrong and 1 invented. Seventeen of those right answers were the same on both sides, so the gap is in the rest. Four lines where the two gave the same figure but no judge could settle it — wall cladding, one slab, the light fixtures and the diffusers — are left out of the score. The difference is less the reading than what comes with it: its wrong answers look like its right ones, while every line we deliver is traced to its sheet with its calculation and marked where it was measured, so you can tell them apart.
The Full Draft Takeoff Pack covers every trade in the set. The fee depends only on how many drawing sheets the set has.
| Drawing sheets in the set | Full Draft Takeoff Pack, until 31 December 2026 | From 1 January 2027 |
|---|---|---|
| 1-8 drawing sheets | $199 | $249 |
| 9-15 drawing sheets | $299 | $379 |
| 16-30 drawing sheets | $399 | $499 |
| 31-60 drawing sheets | $499 | $629 |
| 61-100 drawing sheets | $599 | $749 |
| 101-150 drawing sheets | $749 | $939 |
| 151-220 drawing sheets | $899 | $1,129 |
| 221+ drawing sheets | $1,099 | $1,379 |
Launch prices until 31 December 2026. The second column is what the same pack costs from 1 January 2027; nobody has been charged that price yet, so nothing here is a discount. Your price is locked when you order.
One flat fee, locked before you pay. Quantities only, or with reference rates — chosen before you pay; the questions below say what that costs.
A takeoff is the list of quantities measured from the drawings; an estimate adds prices to those quantities. We deliver the takeoff as an Excel workbook, so you can check it and put your own prices on it. It is a first draft to check before you bid, not a final takeoff and not a sealed engineering document.
Each measured quantity is a live markup in Bluebeam Revu, with its line ID and figure in the Markups List, so you can check our takeoff in the software you already use and keep working from it. No Revu? The same quantities open in Excel and in any web browser.
No. It is a first draft provided as-is, with no warranty of accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose. Every line carries a grade and its assumptions, so you know what to verify. Apply your own contingency and judgment before bidding.
By drawing sheets, in eight bands from $199 — a 600-page submission with 34 drawing sheets, two of them a cover and a general-notes sheet, is priced on 32. The fee is shown before you pay and locked when you order, plus applicable sales tax. The sheet count it is set on is counted in your browser by the rule our intake uses. The count shown before you pay is the count you are charged on — fixed to the files you upload. It is a fixed price for the whole job, both ways: never raised afterwards, and never lowered - if our reading after payment finds more drawing sheets, we measure them all at the fee you paid. Above 300 sheets a published per-block surcharge applies, shown the same way, never invoiced afterwards. A Trade Draft Takeoff Pack is your trades' share of the Full Pack price for the whole set: that price × your trades' billed sheets ÷ the set's billed sheets, rounded up to a price ending in 9, from $149 and never more than the Full Pack - tick every trade and it is the Full Pack price.
Full Draft Takeoff Pack: a guaranteed 48 hours from when payment clears, weekends included · Trade Draft Takeoff Pack: the same 48 hours · Rush: a guaranteed 24-hour turnaround for +40% of the fee, rounded to the nearest $5 and shown before you pay. Our system keeps a measuring lane reserved for Rush orders, so a Rush order goes to the front of the queue and never waits behind standard work. The work, the method and the checks are the same; what Rush buys is the guaranteed turnaround. · Miss the date: refunded in full without asking
No reason asked until your first download. The one exception: an order whose checkout told you, before you paid, that it has no refund on request. To ask: open your order on the status page with your order code. Polar, our merchant of record, returns the payment in full. Once you download, the package is yours and is not refunded on request. A date we miss, a set we cannot read, or a package our checks stop is refunded without asking.
You choose before you pay. Quantities only leaves every unit-price cell blank for your own costs. Reference rates (Beta) — $0 now, +$60–$350 by set size from 2027. Our rate library is still growing, so coverage varies by project; check and replace every rate. If the library is not ready by then, the Beta is extended and announced, and the add-on is only ever charged from a date shown before you pay. Tick the words that go with your choice: · Quantities only — every unit-price cell blank; every formula and the draft proposal still built. · Quantities with reference rates — published rates we can defend, each with grade and source, which we take no responsibility for. On recent orders about a fifth to a half of the lines received a rate — about a third on a typical set, and some sets get fewer; the rest stay blank. Either way you check every price, and your own cell always wins. A reference rate that differs from your own price, a supplier quote or a bid result is not a fault in the package and is not a ground for refund.
Yes. Each measured quantity is a live markup in Bluebeam Revu, with its line ID and figure in the Markups List, so you can check our takeoff in the software you already use and keep working from it. The Marked-up Plans PDF carries each quantity as a markup on the sheet it was measured from, and every package includes DraftTakeoff-Columns.xml and a Tool Chest file (.btx) at no extra cost, so the item, quantity, unit and line ID show as Revu columns. Revu's own Markup Summary matches the workbook line for line (763 of 763 lines across three test packages), a markup moved or given a new depth in Revu is measured again correctly, and Compare Documents shows the marked-up sheets match your original drawings (0 differences on 77 sheets across two jobs). Checked in Bluebeam Revu 21 on Windows. No Revu? The same quantities open in Excel and in any web browser. Bluebeam and Revu are trademarks of Bluebeam, Inc. DraftTakeoff is not affiliated with Bluebeam.
No one needs to be: every quantity shows its source, its assumptions and its grade, so the workbook answers what a call would, and a date we miss, a set we cannot read or a package our checks stop is refunded in full automatically. There is no phone, chat or support inbox — that is how the fee stays low.