InstaBid for Remodelers and General Contractors

The questions that change the number

Any app can multiply square feet. The money in a remodel is in the answers to a handful of questions, and you know which ones because you’ve eaten them. These are the actual questions on InstaBid’s remodel form. Each one moves the estimate.

Kitchen

• Quality level: builder grade, semi-custom, custom or luxury. Pick it once and everything downstream follows. Any single item can still be overridden, so luxury counters in a builder-grade kitchen is fine.
• Layout: keep it, minor (move one or two walls or fixtures), or major.
• Structural: none, non-load-bearing wall removal, or a load-bearing beam install.
• Is the home occupied during the work?
• Cabinets by the foot: grade, base cabinet linear feet, wall cabinet linear feet, and pantry count. Then hardware tier and soft-close hinges and slides.
• Island: yes or no, and how many feet. The island adds its own cabinets, its countertop and its own electrical. The electrical is the part people forget.

Bath

• What kind of bath: powder room, hall, guest suite or primary.
• Layout: keep it, the vanity moves, or a full reconfiguration.
• Plumbing: fixtures stay on the existing lines, or supply and drain get moved.
• Occupied during the work? Asked here too.

Addition

• What the room is: bedroom, office, family room, bath, primary suite, laundry or mudroom.
• Footprint and stories: one story or two.
• Foundation: slab on grade, crawlspace, pier and beam, or a basement tie-in.
• Sewer or septic: with a “not sure” answer, because sometimes the homeowner doesn’t know.
• Roof: the material it has to match, and how it ties in (shed, gable or hip).

About luxury: when you pick luxury, those selections are priced as an allowance, not a specific product. That’s how you’d write it by hand, because nobody has picked the faucet yet.

Running subs and the job after the bid

• Sub bids side by side, your markup hidden. Compare the electrician’s number against the other electrician’s, and the homeowner never sees what you’re adding. (Crew tier and up.)
• Change orders, priced and signed. Open a wall and find something, and the change order is priced at your numbers. The homeowner approves or declines it with a signature, and an approved one rolls into the job total. The original bid stays frozen, so you can always show what changed. (Every tier.)
• A material list your supply house can work from. Every estimate comes out with the full material list, trade-grouped with quantities figured, ready to hand your supply house. On Shop, it prices at your own supplier account pricing.
• Reusable bid templates. Save a job as a skeleton and reuse the scope. The prices update to current cost. (Crew tier and up.)

From John

I was a general contractor for thirty years. I’ve bought the material, hung the drywall, eaten the change orders and run crews. I could walk a job and know the number in two minutes. What I couldn’t do was face the eight-hour write-up afterward.

The number was never the hard part. The write-up was. I’d dodge it for days, and I lost more jobs to that than I ever lost to being outbid.

InstaBid exists because I needed it and nobody would build it. I’m not a software guy who researched contractors. I’m the customer.

John also co-hosts Around the House, a home-improvement show on 200+ stations with 1M+ weekly reach. It’s thirty years of straight talk about building, pricing and running the business, and InstaBid talks the same way.

See it work before you sign up for anything

Click a job and get the number the way your customer would. No signup, no salesman.

See it work → · or compare the tiers →