You lay the pavers all day and price the job at the kitchen table at night. Hardscape Bid Builder turns a patio's square footage into a full material takeoff, your true cost stack, and a client-ready PDF — built for 1–3 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 the cheap tools skip and the pricey suites bury — 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.
See a specimen bid →Shaped by the crews who use it
Join as a founding crew and lock the founding rate for good. Founding crews decide what v1 includes. Early access opens this fall, capped at the first 50 founding crews.
Join the waitlistChecked 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 | Founding rate | 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.
Running a bigger crew? Same engine — fast, defendable numbers for whoever prices your work.
Join the waitlistHardscape is where we start. The same “do the real cost math” engine is coming to the trades next door — same kind of crew, same underbidding problem. Founding members get first access to each pack as it lands.
Pick a fence type — wood privacy, chain-link, vinyl — and enter run length, gates, and corners. Out comes the bill of materials with post-spacing rules and the per-foot cost stack. Kills the #1 fence bid error: mis-counting posts on corners and gates.
Post count auto-corrected for every corner and gate.
Enter gutter runs by elevation. It flags two-story sections for the height adder, counts downspouts, elbows, and hangers per foot, adds the gutter-guard upsell, and totals a priced bid — so you stop under-measuring by 12–18 ft and underbilling every job.
Two-story runs caught before they underbill the job.
On the list, you help decide which pack ships first.
Usershaped, the studio behind Hardscape Bid Builder, takes on a small number of custom builds each quarter for contractors this product doesn't serve.
If Hardscape Bid Builder already covers your trade, the waitlist is faster and cheaper.
Plain-English guides to the numbers that decide whether a hardscape job makes money.
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 (FenceCount) and gutter (GutterFoot) packs run on the same engine next — same kind of crew — but only after the hardscape core is solid.
A flat monthly subscription — a fraction of what the big estimating suites charge, never per-seat, and never gated behind a $400 tier. We'll set the exact price at launch; founding members who join early access and give feedback lock the lowest price we ever offer.
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.
Yes. A specimen bid — the client-facing PDF plus the internal true-cost-stack page behind it — is free to view, no email required. Look for "See a specimen bid" near the top of this page or on Step 3 below.