A Cost Library That Actually Saves You Time
We shipped a reusable cost library so estimators stop retyping the same line items on every job. Add a cost once, reuse it forever.
Every estimator we talked to had the same workflow tic: open the last estimate, copy a line item, paste it into the new one, change the price, and hope they grabbed the right version. Pricing data lived in spreadsheets, in emails, in someone's head. The cost library is our answer to that mess.
Define a cost once, reuse it everywhere
The model is deliberately small. A cost entry has a name, a category, a unit, and a price — the four fields you'd write on the back of a napkin if a colleague asked how you priced something Add a Cost to the Cost Library. That's it. No variants, no conditional logic, no pricing tiers in v1. We wanted the mental overhead of adding an entry to be lower than the overhead of not adding one, because a library only pays off if people actually populate it.
Category and unit do real work here. Category is how you'll find the entry six months from now when you've got a few hundred of them. Unit (per hour, per square foot, per fixture) is what makes the entry composable inside an estimate — quantity times unit price is the whole game.
Why this unlocks the rest of the roadmap
Estimates have always been the centerpiece of the product, but until now every estimate was an island. Standardizing cost entries means we finally have a shared vocabulary across estimates: the same "2x4 stud, per linear foot" line item on Tuesday's bid is the same one on Friday's. That opens the door to things we've wanted to build for a while — bulk price updates when a supplier hikes rates, margin analysis across jobs, and templated estimates that aren't just copy-paste.
It also means onboarding a new estimator stops being an oral tradition. The pricing knowledge is in the system, not in the senior estimator's inbox.
What's next
This is the foundation, not the finish line. Next up: importing existing cost lists from spreadsheets, and surfacing library entries directly in the estimate builder so you can pull from them without context-switching. If you've got a pricing workflow that doesn't fit the current shape, tell us — we're actively shaping v2 around what people hit first.