Frequently Asked Questions

Every estimate is generated by Anthropic's Claude model in real time from the contractor's description, attached photos, or blueprint PDF. Nothing is templated. The AI writes section-by-section line items with your saved labor rates, your price overrides, and your markup. No two estimates are identical, and the model considers scope, regional market rates, waste factors, and subcontractor rules.

Accuracy depends on three things:

1. How detailed your scope description is. "Kitchen remodel" gives you a generic estimate; "1995 kitchen gut, 180 SF, shaker cabinets, quartz tops, re-route plumbing, new panel" gives you a precise one.

2. Whether you've loaded your own pricing. Using the AI pricing import flow (CSV, Excel, PDF, or even a photo of your rate sheet) makes every future estimate use your real numbers instead of regional averages.

3. Regional market data. Arez auto-adjusts based on project address — 51 state indices plus 14 major-city overrides (NYC, SF, LA, Austin, Denver, Miami, etc.).

With pricing loaded, estimates land within 5–15% of a manually-built takeoff for straightforward residential scope. You should always review the output before sending it — Arez shows every assumption it made.

Chat and estimate generation use Anthropic's claude-sonnet-4. Image and photo analysis use Google Gemini 2.5 Flash. Renovation previews (Agency plan) use Google Vertex AI's Imagen 3. Pricing extraction from uploaded files uses claude-haiku-4-5 for efficiency.

Yes — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, flooring, painting, roofing, general contracting, remodeling, decks, landscape, and light commercial are all covered. The AI recognizes scope types and applies appropriate units, labor production rates, and waste factors per trade. Specialty work like structural steel, high-voltage, or solar is outside our wheelhouse and you should use a trade-specific tool there.

Nothing sends automatically. The AI drafts an itemized estimate, and you review it before it becomes a proposal. Every quantity, unit cost, description, line item type, and markup is editable. If the AI miscounts sheet drywall or misreads a photo, you catch it in the review step — exactly like you'd catch a junior estimator's mistake before signing off.

We also track the AI's original output vs. your edits in the background, so over time the estimates learn the way you actually bid jobs. You're not stuck correcting the same mistake twice.

No. Your Price Overrides and Labor Rate Overrides always take priority. Once you've uploaded your pricebook (or added prices one at a time), the AI uses your numbers for any matching line item. The AI only picks from regional market defaults for items you haven't priced yourself, and it always marks those defaults so you can see where your numbers are being applied vs. where ours are.

Yes. Every estimate keeps a full revision history — the AI's original draft, every edit you make, and the before/after values. When a client signs a proposal, it snapshots to a PDF. When a change order is signed, both the original proposal and every signed CO merge into a single master contract PDF. Nothing overwrites the signed version and the audit trail is preserved permanently.

You do — the same as if you'd written it yourself. Arez is a tool that drafts; you're the contractor who approves and signs. That's why the review step exists before anything goes out the door. Our Terms of Service are explicit about this, consistent with every estimating tool on the market (including non-AI ones).

Practically, contractors protect themselves the same way they always have: loading accurate prices, reviewing every estimate before sending, attaching clear assumptions and exclusions to the proposal, and using signed change orders for scope creep.

Your data stays fully accessible. Existing estimates, proposals, invoices, change orders, files, notes, and tasks are stored in our own database and never depend on the AI at read time. What goes down during an AI outage is new estimate generation and photo/blueprint analysis — you can still manually create estimates, edit existing ones, send proposals, and record payments. This is standard for any AI-powered tool; we've architected the platform so the AI layer is additive, not load-bearing.

Designed for 1–15 person contractor shops — solo operators through small crews. That sizing is deliberate. We're not trying to replace Procore for a 200-person commercial GC; we're trying to be the best daily-use tool for a residential contractor who needs to quote jobs, send proposals, track change orders, log actuals, and get paid. The full estimate → proposal → invoice → change order → master contract PDF loop is production-grade. If your shop needs subcontractor bid management for 40+ trades or multi-office rollups, Arez isn't the right fit today.

Yes. Arez accepts almost any file format and the AI does the parsing:

• CSV with any column names ("type / name / price / unit" or "Category / Item / Rate / UOM" — the AI handles both)
• Excel (.xlsx, .xls) with any structure
• PDF — distributor pricebooks, scanned rate sheets, printed quotes
• Word (.docx) documents
• Images — a phone photo of a handwritten sheet works
• Plain text or Markdown
• Free-form prose — you can just type "Electrical $105/hr, drywall $14.50 each, marble tile $18 per SF"

The AI categorizes each row as a material or an hourly labor rate, normalizes the unit, and shows you an editable review table. You edit, delete, or confirm before anything is saved.

Matching item names update to the new price. Items that were in your old sheet but not in the new upload stay untouched. Items new to the latest upload are added. You never lose pricing by re-importing.

Example: your original upload had 40 items. A month later you upload a revised sheet with 25 items (the ones whose prices changed). Arez updates those 25 and keeps the other 15 exactly as they were.

Usually yes, but not always — that's why we show you a review table before saving. Each row has a material / labor toggle chip you can flip, plus editable name, price, and unit fields. If the AI misreads a row you delete it with one tap. Nothing saves until you hit "Add to AI Defaults."

Yes. Every accepted estimate converts to a client-facing proposal with a shareable link. The client opens it on any device, reviews the scope, types their name, and signs in-browser. Timestamp and IP are recorded. No DocuSign or separate tool required.

After a proposal is signed, you can spin up a change order on the project — title, reason, added or removed scope. You send the client a tokenized link; they e-sign on their phone. On sign:

• The CO's line items append to the master estimate
• The amount adds to the open invoice
• A fresh master contract PDF regenerates — original proposal + every signed CO merged into one document
• You and the client both get notified

Every dollar stays traceable to either the original contract or a specific signed CO.

Yes. Create an invoice from any estimate (or from scratch), track payments as they come in, and the status auto-updates (draft → sent → partial → paid). Partial payments are fully supported. Balance due is always mathematically correct because the database keeps the math — not a spreadsheet.

Yes, via Job Costing. Log actual material purchases, labor hours, and other expenses against each active job. Arez computes real profit vs. estimated profit and rolls up an average profit percentage on the dashboard. It's how you catch loss-making jobs while they're still in progress, not six weeks after close.

Yes — 14 days of Professional features, no credit card required at signup. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime from Settings.

• Starter — $79/month. 1 user, 100 AI credits/month, up to 10 active projects.
• Professional — $159/month. Up to 5 users, 500 AI credits/month, unlimited projects, priority support.
• Agency — $259/month. Up to 15 users, 2,000 AI credits/month, plus AI photo analysis (Deep) and AI renovation preview.

Pricing is per organization, not per seat on paid tiers — your whole team uses the same subscription.

No. On Professional and Agency plans, team members join via a 6-character invite code from the owner. No separate Stripe subscription per person. All data is scoped by organization so team members see everything in the shop, not just their own work.

At trial end (day 14), you're prompted to select a plan. There's a 3-day grace period where Professional features still work. After day 17, features downgrade to Starter unless you've subscribed. Your data is preserved and you can upgrade at any point.

Buildertrend ($399+/month) is a full-stack project management platform built for mid-to-large GCs. Arez is built around AI estimating as the core product, with proposals, invoices, change orders, and job costing as the lightweight workflow. Arez is a better fit for 1–15 person shops that need a real estimate in 30 seconds from a phone, not an enterprise scheduling suite.

If you need bid inbox routing, purchase-order approvals, multi-crew dispatch, or field punch-lists with 100+ sub-trades, Buildertrend is better. For most residential contractors, Arez is the faster path from job site to signed proposal.

Joist is a mobile-first estimate/invoice app for very small contractors — essentially digital carbon-copy forms. It has no AI: you type every line item yourself. Arez generates the whole estimate from a photo, a blueprint, or a voice note. Both platforms are affordable, but Arez replaces the time-intensive part of Joist's workflow.

JobTread has transparent per-user pricing and a strong project management + estimating hybrid. Their "AI Connector" lets you bring your own AI integration rather than generating estimates natively. Arez generates estimates out of the box using Claude — no setup, no AI keys to manage, no per-user math. Pick JobTread if you want deep workflow customization; pick Arez if you want to quote jobs faster.

Togal.AI focuses on commercial blueprint takeoff — fast digitization of plan sheets for large projects. Arez targets residential contractors and can do blueprint takeoff, but also handles photo-scope, voice input, and chat-based estimating. Togal is the right pick for commercial GCs doing quantity surveys; Arez is the right pick for residential shops doing full-lifecycle jobs.

Procore is an enterprise construction platform priced in the $10K+/year range. It's built for $10M+ project volume companies. Arez is built for solo operators and small crews at 1% of that cost. Different audiences — don't compare the feature matrices, compare the fit.

Houzz Pro is a lead-gen + light project management tool with a 3D floor planner. Their "AI" features are mostly template-based. Arez doesn't do lead gen — we're an operations tool that starts after you've already got the client. If you need Houzz's marketplace, use it for lead gen and Arez for quoting and project management.

Yes. We're a B2B SaaS with standard security posture: all API calls over HTTPS, JWT-based authentication with encrypted token storage (iOS Keychain / Android Keystore on native, localStorage on web), row-level-security policies on the database with role-based isolation. We use reputable third-party processors (Anthropic, Google Cloud, Supabase, Stripe, Resend, Cloudflare) and never sell your data.

Yes. Settings → Account → Delete Account permanently removes your user, all projects, estimates, invoices, proposals, files, and associated records. If you're on a paid plan it also cancels your Stripe subscription. Required for App Store compliance; we take the right seriously.

Yes. The bilingual voice input accepts English, Spanish, or code-switched mixed speech ("Renovar esta cocina, 250 square feet, con quartz countertops"). Arez transcribes and generates the estimate in English by default so you can send a clean proposal to an English-speaking client. Full Spanish UI is on the roadmap.

Yes. Arez runs on iOS, Android, and the web from a single codebase built on Expo SDK 54. The native apps have full camera integration for photo-scope, voice input, and document picker for pricing uploads. The web app has the same feature set minus native camera optimizations.

Not yet — it's on the roadmap. Today, invoice data exports to CSV which your bookkeeper can import into QuickBooks, Xero, or FreshBooks. A direct sync is coming in the next quarter.

AI features require internet (they call cloud-hosted LLMs). Normal use — viewing existing estimates, project details, notes, files — is cached on the native apps and works with intermittent connectivity.

Not reliably. Arez doesn't currently ingest union wage tables or prevailing-wage schedules. For Davis-Bacon federal work or union-bid projects you should use a trade-specific estimating tool.