Six AI Takeoff Tools for Contractors, Matched to Trade and Plan Type

Match the tool to what you hold. Hover (a phone scan) and EagleView (aerial imagery) suit roof and exterior work with no plans at all. Togal.AI and Kreo read drawings for interior and general trades. Beam AI covers mechanical and electrical plan sets, and SiteRecon measures landscape and paving sites remotely.

Every accuracy figure below is a vendor claim, and none comes from an independent test. Before paying, run each shortlisted tool on three finished jobs where you know the real quantities, using the method near the end of this tutorial.

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Match your trade and the file you hold to a tool

Start with what lands on your desk, because that decides which family of tool can work at all. Photo and aerial tools need no drawings. Plan-reading tools need a drawing set you trust.

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These pairings come from the trades each vendor names on its own pages, not from tests of my own. Where a trade appears against two tools, the second is the one to try if the first misreads your files.

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What each tool costs, as its own page shows it

Prices were read from each vendor's pages on 1 November 2026, in dollars. Treat them as list prices: several tools bill annually, and some show nothing at all.

The spread is wide: from $18 for one roof report to $25,000 for a year of done-for-you takeoffs. That is why matching comes before comparing, because a roofer and a mechanical subcontractor are not shopping in the same price band.

1. Hover: a phone scan for siding, windows and roof

Hover builds a 3D model of a house from a phone scan and returns measurements. Its pricing page lists an Exterior scan (a model with measurements for roof, siding, gutters, windows and more), a Roof scan, and an Interior scan (a walkthrough with floor-plan measurements), plus Blueprint Exterior and Blueprint Roof options from $99 and $49 on Starter. The page's expedited-delivery note calls these "blueprint uploads", so they build the model from plans rather than a scan. Its measurements page says an exterior can be scanned in "5 minutes", and exports include PDF, XLS, XML, JSON, ESX, SKP, DWG and DXF, though the plan table limits Starter to PDF and ESX.

Best for siding, windows, exterior painting, gutters and reroofing, anywhere you can stand at the property. Plan type: none for a scan. You scan the real house, so a repair quote on a building with no drawings is possible. The Blueprint options take uploaded plans instead, and the pricing page does not list which file types, so ask before you rely on them. Its pages claim "industry-leading accuracy" without a figure.

Quick sum. Starter exterior scans cost $59, $99 or $139 for simple, average and complex houses, and Pro takes $20 off each. A siding firm ordering 12 average exterior scans a month pays 12 x $99 = $1,188 on Starter. On Pro it is 12 x $79 = $948 plus $83.25 a month for the plan, $1,031.25 in all, a saving of $156.75 a month. The break-even is about 50 scans a year ($999 divided by $20), or roughly four a month. Business, at $2,999 a year, charges $79 flat per exterior scan, which equals Pro's average price, so on price alone it pays only if many of your scans are complex. Its other draw is the page's allowance of up to 10 branches.

Watch-outs. The pages do not say how many photos a scan needs, so time your first one. Compare its siding and opening figures against your own method; the sums in the siding estimate template show what to compare, and waste is yours to add. The plan comparison gives typical turnaround as 12 hours on Starter and 4 hours on Pro and Business. Expedited delivery costs $39 a project on Starter and $19 on Pro and Business, and the page says it usually returns a roof within an hour and a full exterior within 90 minutes, blueprint uploads excluded. For roof-only comparisons across vendors, Roofr vs EagleView vs Hover looks at cost per job and turnaround.

2. EagleView: aerial reports for roofs and walls, ordered per property

EagleView builds measurement reports from aerial imagery, so you order by property and need not visit. The residential range on its product page includes roof reports, a Walls report and a Walls, Windows and Doors report. Bid Perfect (from $18) gives total roof area in squares, pitch distribution, facet count and, for steep-slope roofs, a waste factor. Premium Roof Report (from $24.25, pitched on the page as a discounted upgrade after Bid Perfect) adds valleys, rakes, eaves, ridges and hips. Walls (from $40) gives siding and masonry measurements with 3D wall and elevation diagrams, and Walls, Windows and Doors (from $67.50) adds fascia, wall facets, windows and doors. Full House (from $91) puts roof, walls, windows and doors in one report.

Those are the "prices starting at" on the product page. A separate pricing grid shows Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers at different prices, with a call-for-pricing option above them, so what you pay depends on your account. Its home page claims "98%+" accuracy on property measurements and carries a "1-Inch Accuracy" heading about its imagery resolution. Those are vendor claims with no method shown, and the product page calls Bid Perfect's output "preliminary roof data", so treat the cheapest report as a pre-qualifier and not an order sheet.

Best for roofers pre-qualifying leads and siding bidders who want walls measured before the site visit. Plan type: none, only imagery of the property.

Per-lead sum. A roofing firm that orders a Premium Roof Report for each of 20 leads a month spends 20 x $24.25 = $485 at the starting price, more if its roofs are large. If 8 of those leads become site visits, the report cost is $60.63 per visited lead, and any lead quoted from the report alone saves a drive. Those numbers are illustrative. What matters is whether the report cost is lower than the cost of a wasted visit.

Watch-outs. An aerial report shows the roof as it was when the imagery was captured, so ask for the imagery date and look for recent extensions or tree cover over the roof. If the job involves ordering materials, check the report on site before you buy. For the squares and waste arithmetic that follows a roof report, see roofing takeoff with AI.

3. Togal.AI: drawings to areas for finishing trades

Togal.AI says it "automatically detects, measures, and compares directly from your drawings", and it has a chat feature for asking questions of plans. It names doors and hardware, drywall, electrical, flooring, framing and lumber, glass and glazing, painting and general contractors as users. Its home page claims "up to 98% accuracy", "98% accuracy on floor plans" and takeoffs "5x faster". None of those comes with a test method. File types are not listed beyond "any drawing, no matter the file type", so test your own formats.

The pricing page shows Growth at $299 per user per month, billed yearly, which is $3,588 a year for one user, with unlimited automated takeoffs and chat prompts included. Business is custom-priced and aimed at teams of four or more. The page mentions no free trial and sends you to a demo.

Best for interior finishing trades that measure areas from floor plans: drywall, flooring and painting. Plan type: floor plans, ideally clean vector PDFs.

Per-bid sum. For a flooring contractor bidding 120 office fit-outs a year, one Growth seat costs $3,588, or $29.90 per bid. The cost is not the question. Whether the area it finds matches yours on your plans is, so test it on the messiest plan you hold, check what it treats as a room, and look at whether columns, stairwells and cupboards are deducted the way you deduct them.

4. Kreo: PDF and CAD takeoffs across eight trades, with a trial

Kreo is the broadest on file formats of the plan-based tools I could verify. Its pricing page lists PDF, DWG, DXF, DWF, DGN and raster files on every plan, with IFC export, not import, on the higher plans. Its AI includes Auto Measure for rooms, walls, doors, windows and custom areas, Auto Count for repeated symbols, scale detection and zone mapping. It has trade pages for flooring, concrete, electrical, framing, drywall, painting, steel and masonry. Its own claim is that on busy, noisy plans the AI "lands within 94% of the real geometry", and that outline accuracy rose from 72% to 94% between versions. No test method is given.

Essential costs $100 per user per month and has no AI takeoff, so do not buy it expecting Auto Measure. Pro is $175 per user per month for one to four users, and Business is $250 per user per month for five to 20 users ($15,000 a year, including five seats). All are billed annually, and each has a 7-day trial; the page also lists a one-month pilot on Pro and one to three months on Business. One Pro seat is $2,100 a year.

Best for contractors in more than one trade who receive CAD as well as PDF, and who want a trial before committing. Plan type: vector or raster PDF, CAD and image files.

Annual sum. A small framing and drywall contractor with two estimators on Pro pays 2 x $175 x 12 = $4,200 a year. Seven days is a short trial, so line up your three test jobs before you start the clock, and check that the files you actually receive, not the demo plans, open and scale correctly. Scale is where most plan-reading tools fail quietly.

5. Beam AI (iBeam): takeoffs done for you, for mechanical work

The site brands itself Beam AI and says it is "also known as iBeam"; its links point to Attentive.ai. It sells two routes. Do it yourself starts at $8K a year per trade, for HVAC, plumbing and steel only. Done for you starts at $25K a year for all trades, with QA-checked takeoffs delivered in 24 to 72 hours, up to two processed in parallel. It reads PDF plans, specifications, legends and supporting documents, and it claims "99%+ accurate, QA-checked takeoffs and estimates", a claim about its done-for-you service.

It lists a long set of trades: HVAC and mechanical, plumbing, electrical, concrete and rebar, structural steel, civil, flooring, painting, drywall, insulation, roofing, masonry, lumber, paving, demolition, snow and landscaping. An aerial-imagery service for landscaping, snow, paving and striping starts at $10K a year per trade.

Best for mechanical, electrical, plumbing and steel subcontractors who bid large plan sets, and for firms that would rather buy takeoffs than hire an estimator. Plan type: PDF plan sets with specifications.

Per-takeoff sum. A mechanical subcontractor bidding 60 jobs a year pays about $417 per takeoff on the $25K licence. At 25 bids a year it is $1,000 each. Compare that with how many hours a takeoff takes you now and what an hour of estimator time costs, because volume is the whole break-even. Ask how addenda and revised sheets are handled, and whether they count towards the two-in-parallel limit.

6. SiteRecon: remote measuring for landscape, paving and snow

SiteRecon calls itself landscape mapping software, and its footer calls it a GIS platform for property maintenance. Its industries are landscaping, plant health care, lawn care, paving and asphalt, snow removal, utilities and sitework, and landscape construction. Its pricing page says every plan includes high-resolution aerial imagery, with instant AI measurements on web and mobile, self-measurement tools on desktop and done-for-you takeoffs by cartographers. A teaser on the home page claims "95-98% AI accuracy", another vendor claim with no method shown.

Scout costs $39 a month for one user and includes $20 of measurement credits a month. Growth is $250 a month for two users, and Teams ($400) and Partner ($500) cover five, with extra users charged per month. Annual billing lowers the monthly rate, although the annual Scout price appears as both $399 and $799 on the same page, so confirm it at checkout. The page offers one free remote measurement of a real property, which is the cheapest test in this list.

Best for bids where measuring on foot is the slow step: lawn areas, bed edges, paved areas, kerb lengths and lot sizes. Plan type: none. It measures from aerial imagery of the property.

Time sum. Consider a snow-removal firm bidding 15 commercial lots, each visit costing 90 minutes of an estimator's time including travel. That is 22.5 hours before a single price is written, and remote measuring could remove most of it. Test on a lot you already know: compare area and edge length with your own figures, and ask how recent the imagery is and how the measurement handles parked vehicles and tree cover, since those can hide edges in any overhead image.

Plan formats: what each tool reads, and what trips it up

The question under the title is which file you can feed in. The table lists only what the vendors' own pages state, and marks the gaps, because a gap on a vendor page is a question for the sales call.

Test any vendor's accuracy claim on three finished jobs

Pick three jobs you have completed, of different complexity, where you know the real quantities from the final invoice or the as-built record. Run each tool on the drawings or photos you had at the time. Record the quantity per line, work out the error as (tool minus actual) divided by actual, and decide your tolerance before you look at the results. A sensible starting rule is 3% on areas and zero on counts, because a missed door is a missed door.

Illustrative scorecard for one office fit-out, imagined for the sums:

The pattern is the finding. Areas of rooms landed inside the rule, but counts and lengths did not, so this tool's output needs a human count of doors and a length check on partitions, and the drywall area inherits the partition error. That is a usable tool with two named checks, not a failed one. A different result, such as errors scattered across every line, would say something else.

Add the three non-accuracy measures while you are there: minutes of set-up, minutes of clean-up, and how many corrections you made. A tool that is 2% off but needs 40 minutes of repair is slower than a tool that is 4% off and clean. Include the worst plan you own, a faded scan with mixed scales, because that is the file that arrives on a busy Friday. For a fuller version of this exercise on one plan set, see trialling three takeoff tools on one real plan set, and for a small firm's own test, can AI do a construction takeoff from drawings.

Left out on purpose: Bluebeam Revu, STACK and Exayard

Three names appear in the same searches and did not make the six, for reasons I could check on their pages.

• Bluebeam Revu (Basics $260, Core $330, Complete $440, and Max $590 at an introductory price, per user per year). Its takeoff tools are measurement and counting tools you operate, with Dynamic Fill and Quantity Link to Excel arriving on Complete. The AI features on its pricing page sit on Max: AI drawing reviews, drawing comparisons, multi-view stitching and an MCP integration, none of them an automatic takeoff. It suits teams that already work in PDF markup.
• STACK (Takeoff and Estimate "as low as" $299 per user per month, with a free version of takeoff and estimate). "AI Takeoff" appears only in its navigation menu on the page I read, and no AI feature is listed under the plans.
• Exayard (Starter $99 and Professional $249 per user per month, with $100 and $250 of monthly AI credits). Its pricing page names no trades and does not say what files it reads, so it cannot be matched to a trade from public pages.

A tool being left out here is not a verdict. It means the public pages did not let me match it to a trade and a file type, and the same test above will place it if you want to try one.

AI takeoff tool questions from small contractors

Can ChatGPT do a takeoff from a plan PDF?

It can read a simple drawing and count obvious items, but scale handling and long arithmetic are unreliable. Use a takeoff tool built for drawings for the quantities, then use a chat assistant afterwards to check the finished quantity list for missing items rather than to produce the numbers.

Which of these tools can I try without a contract?

Hover charges per project with the first three projects free on its Starter plan, and EagleView sells reports one at a time. Kreo offers a 7-day trial on each paid plan. Togal.AI and Beam AI point to a demo, and SiteRecon offers one free remote measurement plus a Scout plan billed month to month. Terms change, so confirm on each page.

Do I need plans at all for an exterior job?

Not for Hover or EagleView. Hover works from a phone scan of the house and EagleView from aerial imagery, so a repair quote on a house with no drawings is possible. Plans matter for new builds and extensions that do not exist yet, which is where the plan-reading tools come in.

How accurate are AI takeoff tools?

The percentages vendors publish, such as 94%, 98% and 99%+, are their own claims with no shared test, so they cannot be compared. Accuracy also depends on your drawings. Run each tool on three finished jobs and compare line by line with what you actually used.

Is an annual contract risky for a small contractor?

It can be, because several of these tools bill annually: Kreo and Togal.AI per user, Beam AI by licence. Use trials and pilots first, ask what cancelling mid-term costs, and start with the lowest tier that includes the feature you are testing.

Further reads

• AI Estimating Software for Plumbing: Can It Do a Takeoff From Drawings? — Whether AI can take off plumbing from drawings.
• AI Estimating Software for HVAC: Replacement Quotes and Duct Takeoffs — HVAC replacement quotes and duct takeoffs, and what AI misses.
• How Electricians Use AI to Count Fittings From Drawings — Counting fittings from electrical drawings with AI.
• Insulation Takeoff From Plans: Can AI Do It, and What to Verify — Insulation takeoff from plans, and what to verify.
• Masonry Takeoff With AI: Counting Bricks and Blocks From an Elevation — Counting bricks and blocks from an elevation drawing.
• AI Drywall Estimating Software: Plan or Photo Takeoff for a Small Crew? — What AI takeoff tools measure from PDFs, when a scan beats a plan, three accuracy checks, and the bid count where the software pays back.
• AI Estimating Software for Flooring: Test Accuracy on Your Own Plans — What flooring takeoff tools measure from PDFs and photos, how waste and pattern allowances work, and a five-plan test to run before you trust the numbers.
• AI Estimator for Contractors or a Human Estimator? How to Choose — A cost sum, a volume-and-complexity grid and a hybrid workflow for choosing between an AI estimating tool and a part-time estimator, with a named sign-off.
• Asphalt Paving Estimating Software: What AI Adds and What It Costs — AI in paving estimating means measuring and takeoff, not bidding. Four setups priced from vendor pages, plus a tonnage sum and a five-lot test.
• Best AI for Quantity Surveyors: Five Tool Types Compared by Job — Takeoff software, spreadsheet AI, chat assistants, contract review and site capture, scored per quantity surveying job with prices and checks.
• How Much Does Estimating Software Cost? Price Bands With and Without AI — Price bands for a small contractor's estimating software, what AI adds plan by plan, and the break-even hours that justify the spend.
• Which AI Tools Should a General Contractor Buy? What to Skip — A buy-first order, a skip list with triggers, and a hours-it-must-save test for a general contractor, priced for a six-person remodelling firm.
• AI Construction Design Software: What Renovation Contractors Can Draw — A renovation contractor's guide to AI design software: scan-to-plan, layout options and mock-ups compared, with the points where a professional must take over.
• AI Tools for Construction Estimating: Bid Checks After the Takeoff — Takeoff tools make quantities; checking the bid is a different job. A comparison with list prices and a five-gate bid check on a worked example.
• How to Bid Concrete Jobs: Quantities, Pump Costs and AI Checks — A concrete bid built line by line: volume, waste, pump, labour, finishing and washout, with AI prompts that recheck your arithmetic and catch missing lines.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: vendor pages for Hover (pricing, measurements), EagleView (residential reports, pricing), Togal.AI (home, pricing), Kreo (home, pricing), Beam AI also called iBeam (home, pricing), SiteRecon (home, pricing), Bluebeam, STACK and Exayard, viewed 1 November 2026. Accuracy figures are the vendors' own claims.