Including the ones with awkward answers. If what you need is not here, email us — a person reads it.
No. The free plan needs no account, no email address and no card. Open the application and start measuring. A licence key is the only thing you ever enter, and that is only if you buy.
Nothing, if you would rather not. BillMate runs in a modern browser on a phone, a tablet or a desktop. There are also installers for Windows, macOS and Linux if you want it in your dock.
2 active projects, with taking-off, rate build-ups, provisional and prime cost sums, and the complete rate library including import, apply, capture and uplift. The free plan also exports 2 bills in total, each marked as a free export, so you can see exactly what a client receives. What it does not include is clean, unlimited exporting, the AI assistant, measuring on screen, tender analysis and post-contract.
From a PDF or an image of a drawing, yes. From a BIM model, no. On-screen measurement is part of the Pro licence: load a PDF (any sheet of a set), a photo or a screenshot of the plan, mark a line whose real length you know to set the scale, then tap off measurements — the rooms on a plan are found and measured for you to check. They arrive on the dimension sheet as ordinary dimension lines with your notes, where they can be checked before anything reaches the bill.
Two more routes, and their limits. A DXF is read directly, in its own units: pick lines, tap inside rooms, take whole layers or count blocks, and the rows land on the same dimension sheet. A DWG has to be saved as DXF first. From an IFC model, BillMate reads the quantities the model was exported with and totals them by element type and level; it computes nothing from the 3D geometry, so a model exported without base quantities gives counts only. If your work is model-led, a package built for that is still the right tool. How on-screen measurement works · the fuller comparison.
Section templates ship for BESMM4(R), RICS NRM1, RICS NRM2, RICS POMI, ASAQS SMM, CPWD / DSR, CSI MasterFormat, plus general elemental and trade breakdowns. The standard you pick also instructs the AI on how to word and measure items, and it prints on the bill so a client's surveyor knows how to read your measurement.
What none of them do is check your measurement. A template structures the bill and guides the drafting; the measurement, and responsibility for it, stay yours. What each standard covers.
Yes, as a work-section template. Start a project from NIQS BESMM4(R) (Nigeria) and you get its eighteen work sections, from Preliminaries through to Civil Engineering Works. With BESMM4(R) selected, the AI assistant is also instructed in its work sections, item descriptions, deemed-included rules and units.
What we will not say is "compliant". No software audits your measurement against a method of measurement, and none can make an incorrectly measured bill correct. BillMate structures a bill for BESMM4(R); the measurement is yours. The full position, with the section list.
Yours, first and always. You import a schedule, capture rates from bills you price, or build them up from constituents. BillMate ships with no rate data of its own, because a rate from somebody else's job in somebody else's city is not a rate. Two optional extras sit alongside: the Market rates add-on brings in this week’s material prices for Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, which your own build-ups turn into rates, and rate circles let you receive rates from surveyors you choose, each labelled with who sent it.
It drafts. Given a description of the works it can generate items for a section or a whole bill, suggest a rate build-up, and word items to the measurement standard you selected. Your library is the first price basis; the model fills gaps.
Every rate it produces is marked on screen and counted on the exported document. An AI rate is a plausible starting figure, not market evidence. How we handle that.
When you use AI assistance, BillMate sends the relevant project context, selected market, currency, measurement standard, and available rate-library information directly to Groq for processing. AI requires an internet connection. Generated descriptions, quantities, build-ups, and rates must be reviewed by a qualified professional.
The request goes from your device directly to Groq using your own API key — it does not pass through any server of ours, because we do not operate one. If you never use the AI features, nothing ever leaves the device.
Not to us. The AI features are part of the Pro licence, and they need a Groq API key that you create and hold yourself. We do not resell tokens and we do not mark them up. Groq sets its own pricing and account terms, so check them directly before you rely on the feature.
Every rate carries the month it was priced and the location it was priced in. Anything older than 12 months is flagged stale in the library and on the bill. You can uplift a whole schedule by a percentage when the year turns, and the uplift is recorded as the rate's provenance.
3 devices on a Pro licence. A Team pack covers 5 people sharing one key with 10 devices between them, paid once. A browser on a tablet counts as a device of its own.
Both licences are a one-time payment — no subscription and no renewal date — and there are four regional prices rather than one price converted at an exchange rate:
Global — $59 Pro licence, $199 Team pack; Africa — ₦39,999 Pro licence, ₦149,999 Team pack; South Africa — R699 Pro licence, R2,499 Team pack; India — $32 Pro licence, $109 Team pack.
Africa and India are priced for local purchasing power and South Africa in between. They are standing prices, not promotions, and they will not be corrected upward to match the global one. India is charged in US dollars, not rupees, because dollars is what that checkout displays — we are not going to quote a rupee figure you will never see. If your market has no price of its own you buy the global product and your bank applies the conversion.
Nothing is chosen from your IP address. Pick your region on the pricing page and the amount, the currency and the checkout all follow it. Free and paid, line by line.
Activating a key needs a connection the first time on each device. After that the app re-checks quietly about every 3 days whenever it happens to be online, and keeps working with no connection at all for up to 30 days before Pro stops. The AI needs a connection when you use it. Measuring, pricing, the library and exporting all work offline.
On your device, in the browser or application's own storage. We hold no account for you. If you turn on sync (Pro), your projects are encrypted on the device with a passphrase only you hold before they are sent, so our server stores what it cannot read — there is still nothing for us to look at. The privacy page says this in more detail.
Email us within 14 days of purchase and we refund it in full, no questions asked. That covers the Team pack as well as an individual licence, and a Team pack is not pro-rated for partly-used seats.
Try the free plan first though — it is the complete tool on 2 projects, so most questions about whether BillMate fits your work can be answered before you spend anything. The full refund policy.
You lose the projects, unless you have a backup or had sync turned on — turn sync on on a new device with the same passphrase and they come back. Without either, this is the honest cost of local storage. BillMate reminds you to back up after 14 days and the whole dataset is a single file. Take the reminder seriously.
Not at the same time. BillMate is a single-surveyor tool per project: sync keeps one licence's devices in step, but it is not live co-editing, and if the same project changes on two devices before they sync, both versions are kept side by side. A Team pack covers 5 people, each on their own projects; hand work over with a backup file. Rate libraries merge on restore rather than overwrite.
14 currencies — USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, INR, AED, SAR, SGD, ZAR, KES, GHS, NGN, KWD — each rendered and rounded to its own precision, so a Kuwaiti dinar shows three decimals rather than two.
6 interface languages: English, Arabic (right-to-left), French, Spanish, Hindi, Tamil. Professional terms of art stay in English by default, because most surveyors read them that way, but you can switch that off.
2 projects, no sign-up, and the whole rate library included.