# DraftTakeoff > A construction quantity takeoff service for contractors bidding in the United States. Send a PDF plan set and receive a graded first-draft takeoff within 48 hours: quantities by trade, each traced to the sheet it was measured from, with the calculation behind it. One flat fee set by the drawing-sheet count and shown before you pay. DraftTakeoff is an automated service operated by an independent engineer. It is not a licensed engineering firm. The output is a first draft to check, price and decide on, not a sealed engineering document. Payments are handled by Polar Software, Inc., the merchant of record. Projects outside the United States are accepted and delivered in the US format. ## Fees - Full Draft Takeoff Pack: 1-8 drawing sheets $199; 9-15 drawing sheets $299; 16-30 drawing sheets $399; 31-60 drawing sheets $499; 61-100 drawing sheets $599; 101-150 drawing sheets $749; 151-220 drawing sheets $899; 221+ drawing sheets $1,099 (launch fees, in force until 2026-12-31) - Trade Draft Takeoff Pack: your trades' share of the Full Draft Takeoff Pack price, from $149 - The fee is shown from the sheet count before payment; the sheet count and the Plan Check reading are free. ## Pages - [DraftTakeoff — Construction quantity takeoffs you can check, price and decide on](https://drafttakeoff.com/) - [Sample Construction Takeoff — Workbook and Quantity Model | DraftTakeoff](https://drafttakeoff.com/sample): Open a sample construction quantity takeoff before you order: the Excel workbook with its calculation sheets, the Where We Measured pages and a schematic Quantity Model, for Maple Street Community Hall, a fictional 3,200 SF building we drew. Illustrative figures only. - [Terms of Service & Refund Policy — DraftTakeoff](https://drafttakeoff.com/terms): How DraftTakeoff sells, delivers and refunds: measured quantities traced to the sheet, reference rates you choose, one flat fee per project, delivery dates we refund against, and what a graded first draft is and is not. - [Public Bid Record — DraftTakeoff](https://drafttakeoff.com/ledger): Our takeoffs compared line by line with public agencies' own quantities - results published either way, misses included. - [Concrete Takeoff from PDF Plans — DraftTakeoff](https://drafttakeoff.com/concrete-takeoff): Concrete takeoff from your PDF plans: concrete by volume (CY), rebar by weight from the bar schedules, formwork by contact area with slab edges. 48 hours, from $149. - [Electrical Takeoff from PDF Plans — DraftTakeoff](https://drafttakeoff.com/electrical-takeoff): Electrical takeoff from your PDF plans: fixtures by type, devices counted, panels from the panel schedules, conduit and wire by length. 48 hours, from $149. - [Watch: a takeoff you can check — DraftTakeoff](https://drafttakeoff.com/watch): One minute: drop your plans, see your sheet count and fee free, and open a draft takeoff where every number is traced to its sheet. - [How Much Does a Construction Takeoff Cost? — DraftTakeoff](https://drafttakeoff.com/takeoff-cost): What a construction quantity takeoff costs at DraftTakeoff: one flat fee set by your drawing-sheet count, shown free before you pay, delivered in 48 hours, from $149 for one trade. - [Construction Takeoff Service from PDF Plans — DraftTakeoff](https://drafttakeoff.com/takeoff-service): Send a PDF plan set. See your sheet count and flat fee free, then get a first-draft takeoff you can check line by line. 48 hours, from $149. ## Questions and answers ### Is this a final takeoff I can bid from? No. It is a first draft provided as-is, with no warranty of accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose. Every line carries a grade and its basis to confirm, so you know what to verify. Apply your own contingency and judgment before bidding. ### My drawings are not all in English. Can you take them? Yes. We work in English, and text in another language - a whole sheet, a logo, a sign, a note - is translated as we measure rather than left out. Every line taken from translated text says so at the start of its basis to confirm, with what the original says, and carries a lower grade: treat our translation as a first reading to check. If other languages are found, the email we send when work starts says so. ### Do you take civil and utility sets, or only buildings? Both. Roads, bridges, culverts, water and wastewater plants, pump stations and site utilities are priced by drawing sheets like a building, and measured as DOT-style pay items. A plant with a small building is read as both. Process equipment and process piping inside a plant (Divisions 40 to 48) are not measured, and Plan Check shows this before you pay. ### What file formats work? PDF plan sets — the price and every quantity come from the PDF. You may add the DWG/DXF exported with that same set (same sheets, same revision); we use it only to double-check counts and areas against the PDF, and a CAD file from another revision is set aside. Specs may come as PDF, Word or Excel. Crisp scans work; a set we cannot process is refunded automatically. Quantities come in US units — LF, SF, CY, EA. ### What is Plan Check? The free first step, run entirely in your browser: sheets counted, trades found, duplicate sheet revisions caught, the scope words (NIC, BY OTHERS, ALTERNATE …) listed by sheet, the schedules your set carries, door and window marks checked against them, and your fee shown before you pay. It says what your set contains; nothing is measured. No account, no upload. ### Do you fill in reference rates, or do I price it myself? You choose before you pay. Quantities only leaves every unit-price cell blank for your own costs. Reference rates (Beta) — $0 now, +$60–$350 by set size from 2027. Our rate library is still growing, so coverage varies by project; check and replace every rate. If the library is not ready by then, the Beta is extended and announced, and the add-on is only ever charged from a date shown before you pay. Tick the words that go with your choice: · Quantities only — every unit-price cell blank; every formula and the draft quotation still built. · Quantities with reference rates — published rates we can defend, each with grade and source, which we take no responsibility for. On recent orders about a fifth to a half of the lines received a rate — about a third on a typical set, and some sets get fewer; the rest stay blank. Either way you check every price, and your own cell always wins. A reference rate that differs from your own price, a supplier quote or a bid result is not a fault in the package and is not a ground for refund. ### What is the Pricing Studio, and where do my prices go? One file in both the Full and the Trade Draft Takeoff Pack that opens in any web browser, with no internet needed. · Our quantities are locked; you type your material and labor costs, markup and tax - or one subcontractor's sum for a whole trade. · Every line shows our reference band beside your cost, and a cost far outside it is flagged so a slipped unit cannot hide in the total. · The overview shows how the quote is built up, which ten lines carry most of the value, material against labor by trade, and a what-if slider for margin and waste. · It prints your quotation on paper or as a PDF, with room for your letterhead, plus an internal cost summary for your own file. · It writes your prices into the workbook as a new copy (-priced-r1, r2 …) and reads them back from it. Your prices stay on your computer: the file cannot connect to the internet, and we keep no copy. ### What happens where the drawings cannot answer? Where the set implies work it does not detail — reinforcement with no bar schedule, formwork to a pour — the line is estimated from a published ratio, labelled so and graded low. Where a dimension is simply not there, the line prints SOURCE INSUFFICIENT, the quantity stays zero, and the reason is given: a dimension the drawings never give is never invented. If we hold no published benchmark rate for your building type, the Project Overview leaves its benchmark cost box out and says so; the quantities are measured all the same. ### How fast is delivery, and what does Rush actually buy? Full Draft Takeoff Pack: a guaranteed 48 hours from when payment clears, weekends included · Trade Draft Takeoff Pack: the same 48 hours · Rush: a guaranteed 24-hour date for +40% of the fee, rounded to the nearest $5 and shown before you pay. Our system keeps a measuring lane reserved for Rush orders, so a Rush order goes to the front of the queue and never waits behind standard work. The work, the method and the checks are the same; what Rush buys is the guaranteed date. · Miss the date: refunded in full without asking ### Can I get an invoice in my company's name? Yes. Polar, our merchant of record, sends a receipt and a tax-correct PDF invoice for every order. Add your company name, tax ID and billing address yourself in Polar's customer portal — the link is on your receipt. ### How is the price set — and can it change after I upload? By drawing sheets, in eight bands from $199 — a 600-page submission with 34 drawing sheets, two of them a cover and a general-notes sheet, is priced on 32. The fee is shown before you pay and locked when you order, plus applicable sales tax. The sheet count it is set on is counted in your browser by the rule our intake uses. The count shown before you pay is the count you are charged on — fixed to the files you upload. It is a fixed price for the whole job, both ways: never raised afterwards, and never lowered - if our reading after payment finds more drawing sheets, we measure them all at the fee you paid. Above 300 sheets a published per-block surcharge applies, shown the same way, never invoiced afterwards. A Trade Draft Takeoff Pack is your trades' share of the Full Pack price for the whole set: that price × your trades' billed sheets ÷ the set's billed sheets, rounded up to a price ending in 9, from $149 and never more than the Full Pack - tick every trade and it is the Full Pack price. ### Do the cover, notes and specifications count toward the fee? No. Only plans, elevations, sections, details and schedule sheets are billed. The cover, sheet index, general notes, code summary and symbols or legend sheets — numbered in the G, T or CS series or in each discipline's 0-series, such as A0.1 or E001 — are read for the analysis and never charged, and neither are specifications, addenda, reports or any other document. Plan Check lists the free sheets by number before you pay. Send the whole set: the notes and specifications answer questions the plans leave open. A sheet in any of those series titled as a plan or a schedule (T-101 TELECOM PLAN, A0.1 SITE PLAN) is billed, and a sheet whose number or title cannot be read is counted as billed; Plan Check tells you how many before you pay, and the count shown is the count you are charged on. ### How do refunds work? No reason asked until your first download, unless the checkout told you before you paid that this order does not carry it: open your order on the status page with your order code and ask. Polar, our merchant of record, returns the payment in full. Once you download, the package is yours and is not refunded on request. A date we miss, a set we cannot read, or a package our checks stop is refunded without asking. ### What if part of my set cannot be measured? You still get the package, and the Confidence Report says exactly which lines are affected and what to check — a sheet that was not sent, a detail with no dimension on it, a scan too poor to measure. We would rather hand you the work with its limits named than hold it back until it is perfect. What we never send is a package that fails our safety checks: another job's data in your file, a formula that does not compute, a total that is wrong, a unit from the wrong country. Those are not delivered at all — you are refunded. ### Do you keep my drawings? Your files are read to produce your package and are not published, resold or shown to another customer. What we keep is the work we produced — the measured quantities and their working — to improve the system, and we tell you that plainly rather than burying it. Your files sit in our own private, encrypted storage, are measured on a machine we control, and pages are read by our AI model provider under commercial terms that forbid training on them — never an online conversion service, never a file-sharing site. The Terms name every place they go. Your original drawings are deleted 2 days after your package is delivered — we have no reason to keep them, since a refund never requires us to re-open them. The download link for the package itself stays live for 30 days; the package includes marked-up images of the pages we measured, so it is deleted when that link expires. ### Who do I talk to if I have questions? No one needs to be: every quantity shows its source, its basis to confirm and its grade, so the workbook answers what a call would, and a date we miss, a set we cannot read or a package our checks stop is refunded in full automatically. There is no phone, chat or support inbox — that is how the fee stays low.