Full disclosure up front, same as the buyer's guide: this is written by the people who built TH Takeoff. Every specific claim below is checkable — against your own drawings, in the trial, not against a demo we controlled.

What TH Takeoff is

A quantity takeoff workspace built into Tender Helper: draw areas, linear runs and counts directly on a tender's drawing sheets, get SF/LF/EA quantities plus derived concrete volume, and print or export the marked-up sheets when you're done. It runs entirely in your browser — no install, no dongle, no separate licence to manage.

It sits beside, not instead of, the rest of Tender Helper: the same tender that's had its spec and addenda read for a cited scope of work is the tender you measure. That pairing is the actual point, and we'll come back to it.

How it works

Open a drawing sheet, calibrate its scale (a preset, a typed ratio, or a two-point pick against a printed dimension), and start drawing. Every shape belongs to an item — "125mm slab on grade," "sawcut," whatever you name it — and items can carry sub-items for how a pour is actually split: by pour sequence, then by thickness within a pour. Volume is computed automatically from each piece's own area and depth, summed up through the tree, with waste applied once at the top. Deductions cut area out cleanly; a purpose-built boundary-cut tool handles the case an ordinary deduction gets wrong (below). When you're done, print exactly the sheets carrying takeoff, at their real size, or export a CSV.

None of this needs the AI side of Tender Helper to be turned on. It's plain geometry and arithmetic, running on your own drawn shapes.

Built on what already works

Two deliberate choices, both borrowed rather than invented:

The input model is PlanSwift's, on purpose. Polar and ortho tracking that locks to 45°/90°, endpoint and midpoint snapping, alignment guides between points you've hovered, typed exact-distance entry while you draw — this is the AutoCAD-derived interaction model PlanSwift estimators already have in their hands, muscle memory intact. We didn't design a new way to draw a rectangle. Estimators who've used PlanSwift can sit down and measure without re-learning anything.

Printed output preserves the sheet, the way Bluebeam itself recommends. Bluebeam's own guidance for a measured set is to print "actual size, on custom paper matching the sheet" — because a markup means something specific relative to the drawing it's on, and rasterizing or resizing breaks that. TH Takeoff's export copies the source PDF page rather than rendering it to an image, so size, rotation and vector text all survive automatically. Same principle Bluebeam teaches; nobody has to build the custom paper size by hand to get it.

Where it goes further

Four specific things, each chosen because it's a real, provable gap in what PlanSwift and Bluebeam do — not a vague "more powerful" claim.

It snaps to the drawing's own lines, not just nearby geometry

PlanSwift and Bluebeam both snap to points you've already drawn or clicked. TH Takeoff can additionally snap to the actual vector linework already in the PDF — the real CAD-exported lines the drawing is made of, read directly out of the file rather than approximated. Dashed and hidden lines (which a CAD export often bakes as hundreds of tiny separate strokes) are consolidated into continuous references first, so a gridline snaps at its true endpoints instead of an arbitrary dash tip. The result behaves like tracing the drawing itself, not eyeballing near it.

Deductions that meet a boundary don't lie about the perimeter

Every takeoff tool handles a simple interior cutout — a pit in the middle of a slab — by subtracting its area. That's correct for an interior void and wrong the moment the cutout touches the edge of what you're measuring, because an ordinary deduction contributes nothing to perimeter. Measured on a real 20-notch dock-leveller slab: the ordinary-deduction approach and a proper boundary cut agree on area (8,294 SF either way) and disagree badly on perimeter — 384.8 LF versus the correct 621.2 LF, a 38% understatement. Edge form is priced per foot, so that's real money, silently missing, on a shape that isn't unusual. TH Takeoff's boundary-cut tool rewrites the boundary itself instead of subtracting a separate shape, so the forming that runs into and around every notch is actually counted.

Cross-references that catch the ones you'd have to hunt for by hand

Bluebeam's Batch Link can auto-hyperlink a drawing set's sheet callouts — a real, useful feature, gated to its top tier and set up per pattern you define. TH Takeoff indexes every sheet's callouts automatically and shows both directions on the sheet you're viewing: what it points at, and what points back at it. It also catches the callout shape most detection misses entirely — a detail number stacked over a sheet reference as two separate pieces of text, rather than one string like "BF-1/S200." On a real 26-079-sized tender, that split form was the majority of the real cross-references on the busiest sheet, not an edge case.

It runs at full drawing-set size, in a browser tab

Desktop takeoff tools avoid browser lag by not being in a browser. TH Takeoff solves the same problem a different way: sheets render through a tiled, zoom-level-aware cache, so a multi-hundred-page set stays smooth without a local install, and pans/zooms composite from cached tiles instead of re-rendering the page underneath you. You get the zero-install, always-current property of a cloud tool without the "large set gets sluggish" trade-off that's usually the price of one.

What it's honestly not

Same standard as everywhere else on this site.

  • No cost database, no assembly pricing, no unit rates. Quantities only — deliberately. Bluebeam's Complete tier can link measurements live to an Excel sheet; PlanSwift's assemblies carry cost data if you build it in. TH Takeoff doesn't price anything, and won't. Your pricing step stays exactly where it already lives.
  • Not a markup or document-collaboration hub. Bluebeam's Studio Sessions and its status as the industry's shared PDF standard aren't something a takeoff workspace inside a bid-period tool replaces. If deep markup collaboration across a project team is your bottleneck, Revu is still the right buy — plenty of estimators will reasonably run both.
  • New, not proven over a decade. PlanSwift and Bluebeam have years of real-world edge cases behind their assembly libraries and their markup tooling. TH Takeoff is built for the ICI bid period specifically, and it's newer — judge it against your own drawings, not against our word.

The part that actually matters

Everything above is a fair fight on takeoff mechanics, and we think it's a fight TH Takeoff wins on the specifics that are checkable. But the real reason it's built into Tender Helper rather than sold on its own: neither PlanSwift nor Bluebeam reads the specification. Measure a slab's area in either one and you still don't know its FF/FL requirement, its exposure class, or whether addendum 3 quietly changed it — that's a separate read, on your own time, with no link back to the drawing. In TH Takeoff, the item you're measuring and the clause that specifies it live in the same file, because they came from the same upload.

The test that settles it costs nothing: bring a real sheet set into the trial when signups open, and measure the way you already do.