<p>You&#39;re right, and it&#39;s an easy line to add once you can turn a model into numbers fast.</p> <p>Here&#39;s how it works in practice:</p> <ol><li><strong>Export your Revit model as soon as schematic design has real geometry.</strong> BidLight doesn&#39;t need construction documents to work with, it reads geometry and metadata directly.</li><li><strong>Let the two AI models classify BOQ line items.</strong> They run at 86% accuracy, so you get a defensible starting number instead of a guess.</li><li><strong>Pull live pricing automatically.</strong> BidLight draws from its own roughly $30,000 pricing database plus Craftsman, 1Build, and RSMeans, so the estimate isn&#39;t built on stale numbers.</li><li><strong>Hand the client labor, equipment, material, and time costs in minutes</strong>, not days. That speed is what makes early advisory viable. You can&#39;t bill for cost advice if it takes a week to produce.</li><li><strong>Keep the estimate live as the design changes.</strong> When the client asks &quot;what if we move the core&quot; or &quot;what if we cut a floor,&quot; the number updates in real time instead of triggering a redo.</li><li><strong>Price the service as its own line item.</strong> Early estimates stop being a favor you give away to win the job and become a service you can bill for, the same shift BidLight is built around.</li></ol> <p>Most estimators are still working from a static takeoff, so they simply can&#39;t offer this at the schematic phase. That gap is exactly where the fee line belongs.</p>