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Count by room
Room-Tally templates turn a walkthrough into bid lines: pick the room type, enter the device counts, and the lines for that room are written from your catalog. How bidding works.
FOR ELECTRICAL & SPECIALTY TRADES
Electrical estimating that doesn’t stop at the estimate.
Most estimating tools hand you a number and stop. The bid then gets retyped into a proposal, the proposal into an invoice, and the install paperwork into a third place — and somewhere in that chain the totals stop agreeing. BidGlory runs the whole path on one pricing engine, from the room-by-room count to the customer’s signature.
Free and open source to self-host for companies under $1M/yr in sales. Managed hosting from $299/month, priced on bid volume and never per user. Those are the actual numbers — not “contact us for pricing”.
The electrical work, inside the bid
These are not integrations or add-ons. They are part of the bid itself.
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Price levels and client pricing
Multipliers on cost or sell price, per bid, and default terms per client — tax rate, labor tax, VAT/GST, price level. How pricing works.
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Proposal to signature
Word or PDF proposals merged from the bid, sent as a link and approved online, with a record of who approved and when. How proposals work.
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One pricing engine
Discounts, taxes, design fees and surtax are computed once. The number on the proposal cover is the number in the grid, because it is literally the same calculation.
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Phased labor, the way you bid it
Rough-in, trim and finish are preset phases with their own labor columns on every line, and catalog products carry default hours for each. Add your own phases — service and panel, temp power, fixtures, final — and rename and order them.
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Two estimators, one bid
Real-time multi-user editing with per-row version tokens. No last-save-wins, no rebuilding an afternoon of takeoff someone else overwrote.
Panel schedules and the NEC load calc, on the bid
Each bid carries its panels — a main and its subpanels, at 120/240, 120/208, 208Y/120 or 480Y/277. Put breakers in slots (1-, 2- and 3-pole, GFCI and AFCI flagged) and the load calc runs as you go: NEC 2023 Article 220, with the code section beside every line and warnings that name the rule. For a dwelling, the standard method and the optional method (220.82) sit side by side against the panel’s main breaker.
Phase balance shows the load on each leg against a 20% / 35% imbalance convention — labelled as a trade convention, not an NEC rule. The load calc is a calculation aid: the page says to verify with the authority having jurisdiction, and so do we. These screens are in the web app.
Plan takeoff that ends in bid lines
Upload the plan PDF and keep it with the takeoff, one page per takeoff. Place a marker for each device on the takeoff sheet, tie the symbol to a catalog product, and draw the rooms; the counts per room update as you go. Add to bid lists every room-and-device count as a new line or an update — and warns before a count would lower a line already on the bid — then adds the ones you tick.
Where this is the wrong tool
Worth saying plainly, because finding out three weeks into an evaluation wastes your time and ours.
- You need deep assemblies-based takeoff at industrial scale. Accubid, ConEst and McCormick have decades of assembly libraries and labour units behind them. If that library is your estimating process, moving here is a downgrade and we would rather tell you now.
- You want a finished product with a long track record. BidGlory is in Technology Preview. That is on the pricing page too. Some shops want that and some very much do not.
Common questions
How much does electrical estimating software cost?
Most established vendors in this category quote on request rather than publishing a price, so compare carefully and ask what a seat actually costs you at your headcount. BidGlory publishes its own: free and open source to self-host for companies under $1M/yr in sales. Managed hosting starts at $299/month and is priced on bid volume, never per user — there is no per-seat fee on any plan, and that is stated in the licence itself rather than only in marketing.
Is there free electrical estimating software?
BidGlory is free to self-host under the terms above, which means running it on your own server and maintaining it yourself. That is a real cost in time, and it is the honest trade: you pay in administration instead of licence fees. If you would rather not run a server, managed hosting exists and starts at $299/month.
Is this a replacement for Accubid or ConEst?
For a large industrial contractor running assemblies-based takeoff at scale, no — those tools have decades of assembly libraries and labour units behind them, and this would be a downgrade. BidGlory is aimed at contractors whose real problem is that the bid, the proposal, the customer approval and the install paperwork live in four different places. If your estimating is fine but everything after it is a spreadsheet and a Word template, that is the gap this fills.
Can I bid by phase — rough-in, trim and finish?
Yes. Three phases ship as presets, plus Install, and every line carries labor in each; catalog products carry default hours per phase. You can add more phases — service and panel, temp power, fixtures, final inspection — rename and reorder them, and the bid summary shows rough-in, trim, finish and install labor on separate rows. Note the presets are named Prewire, Trim and Finish, which is the low-voltage vocabulary; Prewire is what you would call rough-in.
Does it work for low voltage and AV as well as electrical?
Yes, and that is the original design. BidGlory was built for AV integrators, electricians and project-based specialty trades working from one catalog and one pricing engine, which matters on jobs where the same bid carries devices, cabling, labour and the electrical work that feeds them.
Electrical bidding, pricing and proposals
- Electrical bidding software Counting by room, labor by phase, reusing past jobs, and what happens once the bid is won. Read
- Electrical pricing & costing Markup versus margin on every line, price levels, client pricing and tax rules. Read
- Electrical proposals & quotes Word and PDF proposals from the bid, Good/Better/Best options, payment schedules, and online approval. Read
★ FREE 30-MINUTE DEMO
Bring the electrical bid you already fought with.
A free 30-minute demo. Bring a recent electrical bid — the messy one — and we build it in front of you instead of showing a canned deck.