On how this started
Denver, CO
I grew up in the family tile-and-stone business in Denver. Dad started taking me to job sites as soon as I was old enough — measuring rooms, helping on installs, eventually pulling permits. Six years ago I moved to the bid side full-time, and that’s where I still spend most of my days: pricing the next residential bath, the next commercial floor, the next custom mountain home.
We’ve estimated almost a hundred luxury custom homes across Colorado that way — and watched the same disconnected stack of PDFs, Excel sheets, and email threads cost us money on every single one. I’ve made hand-takeoff math errors that cost the company a few thousand dollars on a single bid. Once is a learning experience; the third time it happens you start writing the fix.
I started writing the fix five or six years ago. The earliest version was a Saturday-morning prototype I was running on my own bids — I still have the original code from before it was a business, before it really worked. Cedrus Takeoffs is the descendant of that prototype, after almost a thousand commits and a lot of late nights. We use it on every bid we run. It’s cut our internal bid time in half.
Most of what’s in the takeoff tool today came out of fixing a bid we ran ourselves — edge cases we hit measuring a 240-square-foot shower with five niches and three benches, deductions that flipped a margin sideways, the moment we realized assemblies were the only honest way to price a bath. Every one of those discoveries pushed back into the product. The pricing page got the same treatment: set based on what would have actually saved us money on past jobs, not what the market will bear.
Cedrus is not VC-funded. There’s no growth-at-all-costs pressure here. I priced it flat — $49 a month for crews up to five, $69 for crews up to ten — because the major platforms charge $100 and up per seat. Over $1,200 a year per estimator is a tax on small contractors that doesn’t need to exist. I want this to be a tool any firm can afford, not just the ones with line items for software.
Cedrus Takeoffs shipped first because that’s where someone hands you a blueprint at 4 p.m. and asks for a bid before the morning. Estimates, Plans, Bids, Schedules, and Crews are each on the roadmap. They’ll ship inside the same subscription, built on the same data model, so a plan flows into a takeoff, into an estimate, into a bid — without re-entering anything into a spreadsheet.