QUOTE ENGINE · PRIVATE BETA

One query. Every source.
Costed in seconds.

The quote engine is what separates bidyou.ai from a pricing spreadsheet. It takes a parsed line item — say, "200m of Cu cable, 4×4mm², halogen-free" — plus a project location, and dispatches simultaneous queries across your private supplier database, regional online retailers, marketplaces and affiliate partners. Returns ranked options with provenance, lead time, and total cost delivered.

Status: currently in private beta with a small group of contractors and homeowners. Public retailer coverage rolls out region by region. Steps 01–03 below are live; steps 04–05 are in active development for the public release.

How a quote is built

  1. 01

    Parse the line item

    Extracted from your drawing, BOQ, photo or text description. Normalised against ETIM, UNIFIED-CLASSIFICATION, or your own taxonomy.

  2. 02

    Resolve location + constraints

    Project postal code drives shipping zone, retailer coverage and currency/VAT. Constraints (sustainability certifications, fire ratings, on-site lead time) filter the source list.

  3. 03

    Fan out across sources

    Private suppliers queried first. Retailers + marketplaces queried in parallel. Each source returns within its rate-limit budget — typically <3 seconds per source.

  4. 04

    Rank by total cost delivered

    Unit price + shipping + tax + lead-time penalty + stock-out risk. Confidence-scored matches surface first. Low-confidence flagged.

  5. 05

    Return + remember

    Best match feeds the estimate. All matches retained for audit. Repeat queries hit the cache. Affiliate links decorated where applicable, with disclosure.

Four tiers of pricing intelligence

◐

1 · Your private suppliers

Upload your own price lists (XLSX, CSV, PDF), supplier catalogues, framework agreements. The engine queries these first — your private pricing always wins on tied items.

Contractors with established supplier relationships.

◑

2 · Online retailers

Live queries against retail websites (Leroy Merlin, AKI, Maxmat, Bricomarché in PT/ES; Bauhaus, Hornbach, Obi in DE; Wickes, Screwfix, Toolstation in UK; expanding). Region-aware: queries the storefront for the user's shipping address.

Homeowners and small contractors.

◓

3 · Marketplaces

Amazon, eBay, manufacturer storefronts. Used as fallback or for items where retailer coverage is thin (specialty fixtures, imported finishes).

Anyone — fills gaps the first two tiers miss.

◒

4 · Affiliate partners

Where the retailer or marketplace participates in an affiliate network (Awin, TradeDoubler, Skimlinks, CJ Affiliate), the link is decorated. Commission is disclosed in the quote and never inflates the price you pay.

Homeowners — funds the free tier.

Built into every quote

Region- and currency-aware

Queries are scoped to the project location. Prices returned are at the user's currency and tax regime (€ incl. VAT in EU, £ incl. VAT in UK, $ excl. tax in US). No surprise conversions at checkout.

Confidence scored, not blindly trusted

Every match returns a confidence score: exact SKU match, brand+spec match, fuzzy semantic match. Low-confidence rows are flagged for human review before the bid goes out.

Total cost delivered, not sticker price

Ranking accounts for shipping, lead time, minimum order quantities and stock availability — not just the cheapest unit. The cheapest item that arrives in 3 weeks loses to the slightly more expensive item in stock locally.

Provenance preserved

Every line in the final estimate links back to its source: which supplier, which URL, what date the price was checked, what shipping assumption was applied. Auditable end-to-end.

Cached + rate-limited

We respect retailer rate limits and never re-query the same SKU more than once per hour. Cache hits return instantly. Cache misses fan out in parallel — typical estimate of 200 lines completes in <90 seconds.

On-demand and scheduled

Run the engine ad-hoc when preparing a bid, or schedule weekly re-pricing of long-running projects to catch supplier price changes before they erode margin.

Most estimating tools price what you tell them to price. The quote engine prices what you should have asked for — at the supplier you'd have wanted to use, if you'd had the time to look.

See it run on your project.

Private beta opens 2026. Contractors and homeowners welcome.

Free for the first 3 projects. No credit card.

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