Good bill-of-quantities software has existed for thirty years. It has just never been sold to the people who do most of the world's measuring.
If you are an independent quantity surveyor, a two-person cost consultancy, or a contractor's estimator in a market where a five-figure annual licence is simply not happening, your options have been bad. The established packages are sold per seat, on a sales call, at a price aimed at a large consultancy's budget, and renewed annually forever. The alternative is a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets are extraordinary tools and we are not here to sneer at them. But a spreadsheet will not paginate a letterheaded bill, will not keep your taking-off attached to the item, will not tell you a rate is fourteen months old, and will not stop you issuing a bill with unpriced lines in it. Those are not luxuries. They are the difference between a working document and a professional one.
A one-time price with no renewal date. If the price changes for new buyers, it does not change for you. Nobody should lose access to last year's bills because a card expired.
No server, no account, no cloud copy of your client's costs. The trade-off is that backups are your responsibility, and we say so loudly rather than quietly.
Sites, basements and aeroplanes. Everything except the AI assistant works with no connection at all.
We ship no rate data. Your library is the price basis; the machine fills gaps and admits when it has.
14 currencies, 6 languages, and regional pricing at checkout — so the licence costs what it should where you are.
No BIM or IFC take-off. No reading PDFs or CAD files directly. No synchronisation between devices. All stated on the pages where they matter, not in a footnote.
BillMate 1.0 is a working product with a genuinely usable free tier. It is not an enterprise cost-management system and is not trying to become one. It is used by independent surveyors, small practices, contractors' estimators and design-build teams who need to produce a defensible bill without a procurement cycle first.
Nigeria was our first localised market — naira pricing, Nigerian worked examples and an honest page about BESMM4. The United Kingdom and the UAE and the Gulf have followed, and South Africa and India with them — each with its own measurement standard, its own currency and its own worked examples rather than the same bill with the symbol swapped. Ghana and Kenya followed, and those two are labelled differently on purpose: no national method of measurement ships for either, they say so at the top of the page rather than in a footnote, and the markets table has a column that admits it. What "localised" means here.
One email address, read by a person: support@billmate.site. Corrections to this site are as welcome as bug reports — see the methodology page. Full contact details are on the contact page.
2 projects free, no sign-up, nothing to install unless you want to.