Takeoff reader
Describe the job. Get the takeoff.
Write it the way you would say it out loud. The reader turns your words into geometry; our engines do every calculation from there — and you see both halves separately.
Written and edited by Pablo Ruiz Quintero · Last reviewed 2026-09-15
Rough notes are fine. Dimensions, materials, what it is for. The reader turns that into geometry — then our engines do every calculation. No figure on this page comes from the model.
Or try one:
Where the line is drawn
Language models are good at reading and bad at arithmetic, and most tools that bolt one onto a calculator get this exactly backwards — they let the model produce the number and hope nobody checks. On a site whose whole argument is that the figures are right, that would be self-defeating.
So the reader is given a strict job. It receives your description and must reply with a structure: shapes, lengths in feet, thicknesses in inches, how many of each. It is not asked for a volume, a bag count or a price, and the schema it answers in has no field to put one in. Anything it returns is checked against sanity limits before it reaches an engine.
Then the same code that runs the concrete calculator takes over. The number you see is the number that page would give you if you had typed the dimensions in by hand — because it is literally the same function.
Assumptions are shown, not smuggled
A description rarely contains everything. Say “patio slab” without a thickness and the reader will apply four inches, because that is standard residential practice — and it will tell you it did. Every inferred value appears under “assumed, not read”, in plain language you can disagree with.
When it has to guess something it should not guess — a length, say — it lowers its own confidence and asks the question instead of filling the gap quietly.
The sketch is a check, not decoration
Every item comes back drawn to scale, with dimension lines, the control joint grid and the rebar spacing the engine worked out. A builder spots a slab drawn twice as long as it should be instantly; the same error hidden in a table of cubic yards can survive all the way to the order.
Common questions
- Does the AI work out the quantities?
- No, and that is the point. The model only turns your words into geometry — lengths, widths, thicknesses, how many. Every quantity, bag count and price after that comes from the same deterministic engines behind each calculator on this site. A model cannot invent a number here because it is never asked for one.
- What if it reads the job wrong?
- It shows you what it understood in one sentence, lists every value it assumed rather than read, and draws the result to scale. A sketch catches a transposed dimension in two seconds, which a column of numbers never does.
- Is my description stored?
- The text is sent to the reader to be parsed and is not written to any database of ours. The calculators themselves run entirely in your browser.
- Can it handle a job with several materials?
- Yes — that is what it is for. A deck on concrete footings comes back as two items, each with its own quantities and sketch. Engines still in build return the geometry without a price, so nothing you described gets silently dropped.