Stop Doing Takeoffs at
9:00 PM on a Tuesday
You're not slow. You're paying the Alt-Tab Tax — switching between a PDF viewer, Excel, and six browser tabs, re-typing every measurement by hand. DatumPlan puts the plan, your cost book, and the live proposal on one screen, so a measurement becomes a priced line item the moment you draw it. Measure the plan. Send the bid. Close the laptop.
It's Not Your Math.
It's the Alt-Tab Tax.
Every line item on your bid makes the same round trip: measure on the PDF, alt-tab to Excel, re-type the number, tab back, find your place on the plan again. On a 60-item bid that's hundreds of window switches — done at 9 PM, after a 12-hour day on site. That's where the missed zero lives. Not in your math. In the retype. And a better spreadsheet can't fix it, because the spreadsheet can't see the plan. The error is born the moment a measurement leaves one window and gets typed into another by tired hands — and on a hard bid, you eat that error. No amount of double-checking fixes a workflow that's structurally built to create mistakes.
- Every measurement handled twice — once on the plan, once re-typed into Excel
- One missed zero on a lump-sum bid, and the job is still yours to finish — at a loss
- Three hours of evening work on a detailed quote a tire kicker shops to your cheapest competitor
The Big Platforms Won't Fix This.
They're Not Built for You.
Enterprise takeoff suites are designed and priced for mega-corp commercial volume. If you're running residential or light commercial work, you're the wrong customer — and you're paying for it three ways.
Paying $1,000+/Year for Features You'll Never Open
You need takeoffs and a priced proposal. They're selling 3D rendering, RFI logs, and project management modules built for $400M/year GCs. Every renewal, you're subsidizing someone else's feature list.
A 40-Hour Learning Curve You Don't Have
Onboarding calls, folder hierarchies, three-keystroke shortcuts just to measure a wall. Software you have to learn at 9 PM after a 12-hour day isn't a tool — it's a second job.
The Subscription Hostage Crisis
"Lifetime" perpetual licenses deactivated to force cloud subscriptions. Annual contracts that renew whether you have work or not. Once your projects live inside their platform, they know you can't leave.
If the error is born in the retype,
the fix is to kill the retype.
DatumPlan is a single-screen takeoff engine: the plan, your cost book, and the live proposal in one view. A measurement becomes a priced line item the moment you draw it — the number never passes through your keyboard.
Upload and Measure in Minutes
No setup wizards, no folder hierarchies, no onboarding call. Drag in a PDF, set your scale, and make your first measurement. If you can use a PDF viewer, you already know how to use DatumPlan.
Measure Once. Priced Instantly.
Draw the measurement on the plan and it lands in your estimate already priced from your cost book — linear feet, square footage, counts. The math runs in the background, where tired hands can't fat-finger it. No alt-tab. No transcription. No missed zero.
From Takeoff to Sent Proposal, One Screen
Export a structured .xlsx for commercial hard bids or a finished, branded PDF proposal for residential clients. Your quantities flow straight into your pricing — you never manually type a measurement again.
Don't take our word for it.
Watch the number flow.
Plan on the left, cost book and live estimate on the right. Nothing gets re-typed anywhere. No training videos required.
The Questions You're Actually Asking
You've been burned by software companies before. Fair enough. Here are the blunt answers.
"Is this just another cloud tool that lags on a 100-page PDF?"
DatumPlan does one job — takeoffs and estimates — not a project management suite with twenty years of modules. That keeps the surface area small. Try it on a real plan set from your next bid; that's the only benchmark that matters.
"Will you hike it to $300/month or force an annual trap?"
$29 a month, flat, every feature included — after a 14-day free trial. Month to month, no annual contract, no per-seat tiers, and no sales call to find out the price. Cancel anytime. The price is on this page, not behind a quote form.
"Is it going to take 3 weeks to train my team?"
Your first real measurement happens in the first minute. There's no onboarding call because none is needed: upload, set scale, measure. If your team can mark up a PDF, they can do a full takeoff today.
"I already built a custom Excel sheet over 10 years. Why trust yours?"
It's your math — your prices, your cost book, your markups. DatumPlan just removes the step where numbers get copied between windows by tired hands at 9 PM. The quantity comes straight off the plan. Nothing is transcribed, so nothing gets mistyped.
"Does this require internet? I have zero service in the field."
You need a connection to sign in and load a project. After that, plans cache on your machine so a dropped signal doesn't wipe the drawing you were measuring. This is a kitchen-table takeoff tool, not a field markup suite that pretends to run in a basement with no bars.
"What happens if it's not for me?"
Cancel anytime, no phone call, no retention script. Your exports are standard .xlsx and PDF files — they live on your machine and your OneDrive, not hostage in our cloud.
Do the Math They Hope
You Never Do
Bluebeam Complete runs $440/year. STACK and On-Screen Takeoff run into the thousands — priced for commercial volume you don't have. DatumPlan is $29 a month: every feature included, no per-seat tiers, no annual trap.
Starts with a 14-day free trial. Cancel anytime — your exports are standard .xlsx and PDF files.
The next bid is coming either way.
You can spend Tuesday night alt-tabbing between six windows and praying you didn't miss a zero — or measure it once, price it on one screen, and be the first proposal in the client's inbox. Upload a plan and see for yourself, tonight.
Start Your First Takeoff