Built at the estimating desk, not for it

Steel Estimator Pro exists because the person who wrote it needed it. I'm Jacob Ingersoll, and I estimate structural steel and misc metals for a living.

For years my toolset was the same one most shops run: spreadsheets that grew scar tissue with every job, a takeoff in one place, labor factors in another, and a proposal that got rebuilt by hand at the end of every bid. The commercial packages I looked at were priced and shaped for large fabricators, and none of them priced misc metals the way misc metals actually go together, piece by piece, not by the ton.

So I started building the tool I wanted at my own desk. Not a demo for trade shows, a working program that had to survive real bid days: the Friday-afternoon addendum, the GC who wants the rail package broken out an hour before close, the imported takeoff with a mislabeled column line. Every feature on this site got built because an actual estimate needed it, and got fixed when an actual estimate broke it.

It bids real work before it ships

Steel Estimator Pro runs daily at a production fabrication shop, pricing structural packages, stairs and rails, embeds, and everything else that comes across an estimating desk. New releases go through live bids before they go to anyone else. When the shop closes out a job, the actual hours feed back into the labor standards, which is the same calibration loop the software offers you.

What that means for you

• The defaults are an estimator's defaults. Item codes, size-banded labor, per-piece misc pricing, scope language on the proposal: it works the way a bid actually gets built.
• Support answers come from the author. When you email, you're talking to the person who wrote the code and who bids steel with it every week.
• It keeps moving. The app ships steadily because it's in daily use. If a bid needs something, it gets built.