About ClearBid

From the founder

Gavin Andrews

I built ClearBid after more than a decade in construction. Job after job, I watched the same oversights turn into change orders. They were often avoidable, and left everyone involved confused and frustrated.

A construction dispute doesn't normally start with malicious intent. It starts with a piece of paper nobody read carefully enough. A line that said "framing repair as needed." A bid that never mentioned who pulls the permit. A timeline with no room in it for the wall that turns out to be rotten.

By the time that surfaces, the money is spent and the crew is on site. The homeowner feels taken advantage of. The contractor feels punished for something they couldn't have priced. Both of them are usually right, and both of them would have caught it in ten minutes if they'd known where to look.

What we're trying to do

Give both sides of the table the same second read. Not a verdict, not a price, not a substitute for a professional — a careful pass over the document in front of you, pointing at what's missing and what's vague, before anyone signs it.

A homeowner comparing three bids shouldn't need to already know what a complete bid looks like. A contractor sending an estimate shouldn't find out what they forgot six weeks into the job. That knowledge exists — it's just unevenly distributed, and it usually arrives too late to help.

What we believe

• The contractor isn't the enemy. Plenty of tools in this space are built on the assumption that someone is being cheated. Most of the time nobody is. We'd rather help both people write a clearer agreement than help one of them win.
• You should be able to understand what you're signing. A homeowner or property manager reads a bid like this once every few years; the person who wrote it does one most weeks. Closing that gap shouldn't take years on site — and asking what an allowance covers, or who pulls the permit, isn't an accusation. It's the question a good contractor wishes came up more often.
• We don't set your price. On the contractor side, ClearBid will never suggest what to charge, never call a number too high or too low. It flags what's missing from the scope. Pricing is your judgment and your risk, and it should stay that way.
• Say what we don't know. The output is generated by an AI model reading your documents. It can be wrong. It has no idea what's behind your walls, and it hasn't read your local code. We'd rather tell you that plainly than dress it up as certainty.
• Your documents are yours. We don't keep your bids, your estimates, your uploads, or your reports. They're used to produce your review and nothing else. There's no archive here, which means there's nothing here to leak.
• A second opinion shouldn't cost a day. Most people don't skip the careful read because they don't care. They skip it because it's Thursday and the job starts Monday.