If you're an estimator at a commercial MEP shop, you already know the drill. An ITB (invitation to bid) lands in your inbox on Monday. The bid is due Friday. You have six other bids in flight. The plans are 150 pages of 24x36 sheets, the specs are a 400-page PDF, and somewhere in there you need to produce a number, a scope narrative, assumptions, exclusions, alternates, a list of RFIs, and a qualification letter — all wrapped up in a document that looks professional enough for the GC to take you seriously.
Most shops have a "starter template" — usually a Word doc your senior estimator built six years ago, saved as MEP Bid Template - DO NOT MODIFY_v4.docx, and duplicated into every project folder since. The junior estimator inherits it. Copy, paste, find and replace the project name, update a few things, send. Works fine. It's just… 3 to 5 hours of busywork every single bid.
The tool we built
We built a free, browser-based bid package builder for commercial MEP contractors. You can use it right now at leadwiseconnect.com/tools/commercial-estimate-builder.html. No signup required to use it. No API keys. No subscription. Download a Word doc or a PDF when you're done.
It covers all six standard MEP trades — HVAC, plumbing, process piping, electrical, low voltage, and fire protection — and produces eight sections of a complete bid package: project summary, scope of work organized by CSI division, equipment schedule, assumptions, exclusions, alternates with add/deduct framing, an RFI list, and a qualification letter. Every section is editable inline before you download.
What the tool will NOT do: give you a bid-ready number. What it WILL do: give you a defensible rough-order-of-magnitude range, a complete bid document scaffold, and back 3-5 hours into your week. Every week. On every bid.
Why "rough order of magnitude" and not a real estimate
Let's be direct about this. A bid-ready number comes from a takeoff, vendor pricing, labor rates from your shop's historicals, and an estimator with enough experience to sanity-check each line. No tool — AI or otherwise — replaces that. If any tool tries to tell you otherwise, it is either lying to you or hoping you won't notice when the numbers are wrong.
What our tool does is produce a ROM (rough order of magnitude) estimate, explicitly labeled ±30%, based on published industry averages from sources like the ENR Construction Cost Index, MCAA and NECA published labor units, and RSMeans city cost indices. It's calibrated to 2023-2024 baseline and adjusted for region and building type.
Use it for one of three things: (1) a sanity check before you start your takeoff, (2) a go / no-go decision on whether a project is worth pursuing at all, (3) a ballpark number to discuss with a GC during an early discovery call, before you've committed a junior estimator's week to a detailed bid.
Override your own unit costs
Every default unit cost in the tool — $/ton of HVAC, $/fixture plumbing, $/amp electrical service, $/SF fire sprinkler, 21 line items in total — can be overridden with your own shop's numbers. Click "override costs" on any trade and punch in what you actually bid jobs at. Your overrides persist in your browser, so after one use the tool is calibrated to your shop.
This matters because every shop has different labor rates, different supplier relationships, different regional cost pressures. The published averages are a starting point. Your numbers are better than ours. The tool knows this and lets you swap them in.
Why free forever, and not freemium or paid
Honest answer: this tool exists because we want commercial MEP contractors to know we exist. LeadWise Connect does lead generation, websites, CRM, and marketing automation for local service contractors. We're not going to sell you a bid estimating SaaS. But if we build something useful, put your name in the footer of every document that leaves this tool, and give you real value without asking for a credit card, you'll remember us when you need help with the thing we actually do.
We also don't have to charge anything because the tool runs entirely in your browser. There's no server doing work. There's no AI API burning tokens. You fill in a form, JavaScript does math, templates assemble text, your browser generates a Word or PDF file. Marginal cost of one additional user: zero. Marginal cost of ten thousand additional users: still zero.
That said, the tool does ask for your name, email, phone, and company name before you can download the finished document. That's the trade. You get the document. We get a way to follow up with bid-winning tips, case studies, and the occasional (non-spammy) email about the marketing services we offer. Unsubscribe any time.
How the math works, for the curious
The ROM calculation takes three inputs:
- Your quantities. Tons of cooling, fixture counts, amps of service, linear feet of piping, and so on. You know these numbers — they're from your plans review.
- A unit cost per quantity. Default pulled from published industry data. Override with your own rates if you have them.
- Two multipliers. One for regional cost (Florida = 0.92, West Coast = 1.16, etc.) and one for building-type complexity (warehouse = 0.80, hospital = 1.35, data center = 1.45).
Quantity × unit cost × regional × complexity = trade subtotal. Sum your trade subtotals. Apply a ±30% band (we actually use -15% low / +30% high because our experience is that real bids come in closer to the high side once you add general conditions, markup, and contingency).
Schedule estimate is 0.8 weeks per $100K of MEP scope as a base, adjusted for the same building-type complexity. Labor hours are roughly 45% of the dollar value divided by a $95/hr loaded rate. Both schedule and labor are explicitly "rough order" — for sanity-checking, not planning.
How the bid package templates work
The eight bid sections aren't generated by AI. They're generated by conditional templates — the same way your senior estimator's starter doc does it, but automated based on the trades you check and the building type you pick.
Example: check "plumbing" and select "hospital" for building type, and the scope section automatically adds a bullet for medical gas systems per NFPA 99, and the RFI section adds a clarification request about ICRA infection control class requirements. Check "restaurant" and the plumbing scope adds grease waste systems and the exclusions add kitchen equipment connections beyond rough-in. Check "data center" and the RFI list adds a clarification about N+1/N+2/2N redundancy requirements.
This is exactly the kind of customization a senior estimator does manually, every time, from memory. The tool just encodes it so every user gets the benefit of that senior-estimator knowledge without having to hire one.
What to use it for
Three real use cases we've seen:
Go / no-go decisions
An ITB lands. You're already bidding four other jobs that week. Is this one worth burning your senior estimator's time on? Five minutes in the tool gives you a ROM that tells you: "$1.8-2.4M MEP scope, 12-18 week schedule, 5,000 labor hours — yes we can handle it" or "this is way outside our wheelhouse, pass."
Discovery calls with a GC
A GC calls you about a job that's three months out from ITB. They want to know if you can handle it. "Send me the building type, square footage, and ballpark scope — I'll send you a rough-order-of-magnitude and a preliminary scope narrative by end of day" is a way more impressive answer than "email me the plans when they're ready." You can do that in five minutes with this tool.
Starter scaffold for real bids
This one is the most obvious. Use the output as the starting point for your real bid package. Replace the ROM with your takeoff-based number. Edit the scope, assumptions, and exclusions to match what the plans actually show. Use the alternates list as a memory jog. Use the RFI list to prompt your own clarification questions. Ship a better bid in half the time.
What the tool doesn't do (yet)
It doesn't read your plans. The tool has an optional plans and specs upload, but today those just sit there for your own reference. They aren't being parsed, OCR'd, or analyzed. A future version might change that — but not until we can do it without passing costs back to contractors.
It doesn't track bids across projects. If you want a historical database of what you bid and what you won, you need a CRM or estimating system for that. We build CRM workflows for contractors — that's a paid service, not a free tool.
It doesn't do takeoff. It's not a quantity surveyor. You bring the quantities. The tool does the math and the paperwork.
If this tool saves you two hours on one bid, it's already paid off every hour we spent building it. If it saves one bid you would have passed on because you didn't have time to get it out the door, it just paid for our entire lead generation service for the next year.
Try it
No signup to use it. No credit card. No API keys. No bullshit. If it helps, great. If you want to know what the rest of our work looks like, book a 15-minute strategy call and we'll walk through how commercial MEP shops are using marketing automation to stop losing bids they never saw in the first place.