Built by an estimator, for estimators.

Construction cost estimating is one of the most consequential activities on any civil project — a single estimate decides whether a pursuit is worth bidding, how crews and equipment are sized, and whether a project finishes in the black. And yet the tools estimators actually use have barely moved in two decades. Windows desktop software from the early 2000s, shared network drives, and a spreadsheet for every situation the software can't handle.

Meanwhile, every adjacent discipline has modernized. Design teams collaborate in real time on BIM models. Schedulers pull live data from field systems. Project controls teams run cloud-based analytics. Estimators are still emailing spreadsheet copies and merging revisions by hand.

Estimates should be structured like the work, not like a spreadsheet. Cost folders, production rates, and reusable reference libraries model how construction actually gets priced — not how a row-and-column tool forces you to price it.

AI should assist, not replace. The estimator is the one accountable for the number. Software should surface information faster, flag inconsistencies, and suggest line items — but never write to the estimate without explicit approval.

Institutional knowledge belongs in the product. The decades of crew productivity data, material pricing patterns, and lessons learned shouldn't live in one retiring estimator's head or in last year's folder on a network drive. It should compound in one place where every estimate benefits from every previous one.

Adam Beck is a cost engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with 20+ years of experience in construction cost, schedule, and constructability reviews across large civil works projects. He built CSR Foundry to solve the problems he encountered daily: cost estimating tools that hadn't meaningfully evolved in two decades, and workflows that buried institutional knowledge in disconnected spreadsheets.

CSR Foundry is developed independently of his government work and is authorized for commercial use.

CSR Foundry is rolling out to early access users now. The core estimating workflow — cost folders, production-rate pricing, AI-assisted scope interpretation, and real-time multi-user editing — is in production use today. New capabilities ship continuously based on what estimators actually ask for.

The near-term roadmap focuses on deeper document intelligence (automated quantity takeoff from drawings and specs), richer reference libraries, and tighter integrations with the scheduling and project management tools estimators already use. If you want a voice in what gets built next, get early access and tell us what's missing.