About · Built in Denver
Built on the bid side.
Cedrus is started and owned by Jacob Muzychenko — a working tile-and-stone estimator in Denver who has been writing the tool for almost as long as he’s been bidding. What follows is the story in his words.
I grew up in the trade.
The family tile-and-stone business in Denver. I started as a tile helper, moved onto the installer side, then into the back office and into management. The bid side is where I ended up, and it's still where I spend most of my days: pricing the next residential bath, the next commercial floor, the next custom mountain home.
The old stack cost us money on every bid.
We bid everything — bathroom remodels, local businesses, commercial floors, the tile packages on multimillion-dollar custom homes — on a disconnected pile of PDFs, Excel sheets, and email threads. I've made hand-takeoff math errors that cost the company real money on a single bid. Once is a learning experience; the third time it happens, you start writing the fix.
So I started writing the fix.
The earliest version was a Saturday-morning prototype I ran on my own bids — I still have the original code from before it was a business. Cedrus Takeoffs is the descendant of that prototype, years of late nights later. We use it on most of the bids we run, and it has cut our internal bid time in half.
The work behind it
From bathroom remodels to $2M+ homes.
Residential & commercial.
Bathroom remodels, local businesses, and the tile and stone on custom homes that average north of $2M — the same estimating desk bids all of it. The largest single job we've bid ran past $25M.
Still on the bid side.
This isn't software built from interviews. The founder prices work every week, with this tool.
Self-funded.
No venture pressure, no roll-up. The product answers to the people bidding with it.
The product is the bids we ran.
Most of what's in the tool came out of fixing a bid of our own — the big shower with five niches and three benches, the deduction 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.
Flat pricing is the point.
Cedrus Takeoffs is not VC-funded, and there's no growth-at-all-costs pressure here. 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 priced Cedrus flat, set against what would have actually saved us money on past jobs.
Takeoffs shipped first for a reason.
That's where someone hands you a plan set at 4 p.m. and asks for a bid before morning. The rest of the suite — and the materials marketplace — is coming, inside the same subscription and on the same data model. Nothing ships as a promise; each piece ships when it works.
— Jacob Muzychenko
Founder & estimator · Cedrus Takeoffs
Three things the product is built around.
Pre-con is the highest-leverage hour.
The hour you spend on a bid decides whether the next three months of work are profitable. Tools should be built for that hour.
Fix one thing at a time.
Takeoffs first, then the rest of the suite. Ship something that works before shipping the next thing. Don't fake the roadmap.
Software should feel like the firm.
Pre-con already has a tone — measured, exact, confident. The software should match it. No confetti, no gamification.