You've won the drawings; now the tender has to be priced. You can hire a freelance quantity surveyor, use an estimating service, or spend the weekend on it yourself. Here's what each route actually costs — in money and in time.
A freelance QS or estimator prices the job by hand from your drawings. Fees vary widely with project size and complexity — typically hundreds to low thousands of pounds for a domestic tender, more for anything commercial or contractual. You're paying for a professional's judgement and their name behind the numbers.
A done-for-you service takes your drawings and returns a priced, line-by-line quote. QuoteWise is an AI-powered estimating service built for this: send the pack, get the take-off and a priced bill of quantities back — roughly 10× cheaper than commissioning a quantity surveyor for the same early-stage pricing on a domestic job. Your first 3 quotes are free.
No invoice, but it's not free — a full manual take-off and price-up eats a Friday afternoon, sometimes a whole weekend, and the builder who gets a defensible number to the client first usually wins the work. The real cost is your time and the jobs you don't get to bid.
Whoever prices your tender is really quoting on four things: the size of the job, how complete your drawings are, how quickly you need it back, and how much of a formal, contractual bill of quantities you want. A single-storey rear extension off a full drawing set is a very different job from a partial planning-only scheme where every assumption has to be chased. That's why an honest freelance QS quotes a range, not a flat rate — and why anyone who names a precise fixed fee before seeing the drawings is guessing.
On a domestic extension, a full quantity surveyor is often overkill — but pricing the tender by hand still costs you a day you don't have. QuoteWise sits in between: an AI-powered estimating service that reads your drawings and returns a priced, line-by-line quote for a fraction of QS fees, with every quantity, rate and assumption visible. On complete drawing sets it scores around 80% accuracy against expert-checked baselines across 2,000+ benchmark runs on real UK projects — a working draft to price from and correct, not a fixed price. Median estimate time is 12 minutes, so you can turn a tender pack into a number the same day it lands.
We don't pretend to replace a quantity surveyor. For commercial work, large refurbishments, contractual bills of quantities that carry legal weight, formal cost management on a long contract, or any job where serious money hangs on the numbers, hire a chartered QS — and use QuoteWise to prep the brief and get a fast first pass. QuoteWise replaces the £1,000 QS call on a domestic tender, where a full surveyor is overkill; it isn't a substitute for one where the risk genuinely warrants the profession.
Send us the drawings and we'll price the job for you — the take-off and a priced, line-by-line quote back, every line editable.
Tender pricing is putting a price against a defined scope of works so it can be compared against other bids on the same basis. The scope comes from the drawings and specification; your job is to measure the quantities, apply your rates, and state clearly what is included, excluded and assumed. Two builders pricing the same tender should be quoting the same quantities — where they differ is rates, programme and risk.
For domestic work most UK builders don't, and absorb it as the cost of winning work. It becomes reasonable to charge when the pricing itself is substantial — a full measured bill on a large refurbishment, or a tender that needs a surveyor's involvement. The honest test is whether you would be handing over a document of value even if you didn't win the job.
A freelance quantity surveyor typically charges a day rate or a percentage of contract value, which on a domestic job usually runs into four figures. An estimating service is normally a fixed fee per job, in the hundreds. Pricing it yourself costs no money but takes evenings you could spend on site — and the cost of getting it wrong lands on your margin, not theirs.
Priced by hand from a full drawing set, a domestic extension typically takes a builder one to three evenings once the take-off is done. A freelance quantity surveyor usually turns one around in one to three weeks depending on their book. QuoteWise produces a priced first pass from drawings with a median of about 12 minutes, which you then check and adjust rather than start from a blank page.
Upload the pack. Get a quote you can stand behind.