Built at the bid table, not in a boardroom.
Tender Helper exists because reading a 900-page project manual against a three-week bid clock is a real job, done by real people, and the software industry mostly hasn't met them.
Bailey Irving
Bailey is a practicing estimator pricing institutional, commercial and industrial work in the Ottawa–Gatineau corridor — hospitals, transit facilities, schools, the tenders that come with four addenda and a Friday 2pm close. Tender Helper started as a tool for his own desk: every screen in it exists because a bid went sideways without it.
The product's one rule comes from that desk: nothing is trusted until it's cited. Every extracted scope item carries the document, page and CSI section it came from, and clicking it shows you the source. That's the same check an estimator does anyway — just without the twenty minutes of page-flipping.
There is no offshore support queue and no sales team. If something's wrong with how it reads a spec, you're talking to the person who wrote it — and who has probably been burned by the same clause.
- ICI estimating, Ottawa–Gatineau corridor
- Writes about spec reading, addenda discipline and bid/no-bid calls in Resources
- Canadian company — data hosted in Canada, priced in CAD
- The product: scope extraction with citations for tender documents
Three positions the product takes.
A draft, never a verdict
Extraction produces a draft you review — not an answer you're asked to trust. Items that can't be cited to a page are discarded rather than shown, and the discard count is displayed on every run.
Canadian ICI, natively
CSI MasterFormat divisions, CSA references living beside ACI ones, metric and imperial mixed in one spec, French documents in a bilingual corridor. Not an American product with the prices converted.
It doesn't price the job
Your unit rates, your judgement, your number. The tool finds and cites what the documents demand — a tool that guesses your price isn't one you should trust.
Read the writing, or try the product.
Practical notes on estimating ICI work — or the tool itself, on the tender that's open on your desk.