Hardscape Bid Builder turns a patio's square footage into a full material takeoff, your true cost stack, and a client-ready PDF — so you stop winning jobs that quietly lose money. Built for 1–5 person paver, wall, and walkway crews.
| Line | Amount | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Materials | $1,920 | pavers · base · sand · edge |
| Burdened labor | $3,485 | 40 hrs · $29.04/hr all-in |
| Overhead recovery | $1,000 | 40 hrs · $25/hr |
| True cost to build | $6,405 | materials + labor + overhead |
| Price at 25% margin | $8,540 | $26.69/sq ft · +$2,135 profit |
Miss either layer and the job loses money — usually without you finding out until the season's over.
Base gravel by depth, compaction loss, waste %, polymeric sand, paver and block counts. Free vendor calculators stop here — and lock you to one brand.
Labor hours × your fully-burdened rate × overhead × profit. The layer nothing under $40/mo touches — and where crews quietly bleed.
LawnSite · hardscape“I just did a 60 sqft walk, I think I made $5 profit when it was all done.” First reply: “you forgot about labor and overhead.”
A short wizard captures your fully-burdened labor rate, monthly overhead, and profit target. Do it once — reuse it on every job.
Patio square footage, or wall length × height. That's the whole input. The engine handles depth, compaction, waste, and counts.
Full takeoff, the complete cost stack, and a customer-ready PDF with your logo — good / better / best options included.
Checked against live vendor pricing. The tools that do both math layers price out a small crew; the ones a small crew can afford only do quantities.
| Tool | Does both math? | Typical price | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor calculatorsBelgard, Unilock, etc. | Quantities only | Free | Tell you how much gravel — never what the job costs you. Locked to one brand's products. |
| HandoffAI estimating | Money — not hardscape-native | From $119/mo | General-purpose; its AI takeoff is gated far higher (~$719+). |
| QuoteIQmoney-math tier | Money math | $149.99/mo | The measuring engine is a separate gated add-on ($74.99). |
| ArcSiteCAD-based takeoff | Both | From $159.99/mo | A full drawing/CAD suite — more tool than a small crew needs. |
| SynkedUpclosest full analog | Both | $399/mo | Validates the concept — and prices tiny crews right out of it. |
| Hardscape Bid Builder | Both — quantity + money | $29–39/mo | Hardscape-native, flat monthly, made for a 1–5 person crew. The sharp cheap tool that gets the numbers right. |
Published or independently estimated rates, mid-2026 — categories, not endorsements.
You enter a job's measurement — a patio's square footage, or a wall's length and height — and your own rates (set once in a short wizard). It returns a full material takeoff, the complete cost stack (materials, fully-burdened labor, overhead, and profit), and a customer-ready bid PDF with your logo. It does both the quantity math and the money math that decide whether a job actually makes money.
Yes. The free true-cost calculator turns a patio's area and your crew's rates into your fully-burdened labor rate, the true cost to do the job, and the price you'd need to charge at your target margin — showing margin and markup both ways. It runs on your device, needs no signup, and is a preview of the money math inside the full product.
It's your real cost of an hour of labor: the wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp, and liability insurance. The most common way a hardscape crew loses money is pricing off the bare wage and forgetting the burden — it's invisible on the bid but adds up across every job. The calculator makes that number visible.
Paver patios, retaining walls, and walkways and steps at launch, all sharing one pricing engine. Fence and gutter packs are planned for the same engine and the same kind of crew, but only after the hardscape core is solid.
$29–39 a month, flat — no per-seat pricing and no gating the margin math behind a $400 tier. Founding members who join the waitlist lock the lower end of that range for good.
No. If you can type a square footage into a phone, you can build a bid. It's designed to be used one-handed from the tailgate of a truck, not at a desk.