Is Bid Buddy a Joist alternative?

For estimating and bidding, yes. Bid Buddy is a free contractor bid calculator with AI-assisted, true-margin pricing and Pro proposal writing. It does not handle invoicing or payment collection, so if that is why you use Joist, Bid Buddy complements it rather than replacing it.

Is Bid Buddy free like Joist?

The Bid Buddy calculator is free and needs no account at all. Pro is $9.99/month with a 3-day free trial and adds saved bids, templates, customer records, AI proposals and customer emailing. Founding subscribers keep the $9.99 rate permanently.

Which is better for a one-person contracting business?

If your bids are already profitable and your headache is invoicing, a full back-office app like Joist earns its keep. If you are busy but the money is not showing up, start with the pricing math — that is what Bid Buddy is built for, and it costs nothing to test on your next bid.

Can I move my estimates from Joist to Bid Buddy?

There is no direct import. In practice most contractors rebuild one typical job in Bid Buddy, save it as a Pro template, and clone it from then on — it takes a few minutes and gives you a re-priced baseline at true margin.

Does Bid Buddy work on a phone at the job site?

Yes. It runs in your phone's browser with nothing to install, works one-handed, and supports hands-free voice bidding so you can talk through the job while you are walking it.

Construction bidding software, compared

Most construction bidding software was designed for general contractors with an office and an estimator. If you are the estimator, the crew, and the guy who answers the phone, the buying criteria are different. Here is how to judge an estimating app — and honest head-to-head comparisons.

Five things that actually matter

Does it price to margin or to markup?

Most estimating apps let you add a markup percentage and call it profit. Markup and margin are not the same number — a 30% markup leaves you a 23% margin. If the software never shows you the difference, you are losing money on every job and the report will never tell you.

Does overhead go in before profit?

Truck, insurance, phone, fuel, and the hours spent quoting jobs you did not win are real costs. Bidding software that only tracks materials and labor quietly pays your overhead out of your profit.

How long does one bid take on site?

A tool you have to sit down with at night is a tool you stop using in July. The realistic test is whether you can build a defensible number standing in a driveway, one-handed, in a few minutes.

What does it cost a one-truck operation?

Per-seat construction bidding software aimed at general contractors often starts north of $100/month. For an independent contractor or a two-person crew, that price has to be earned back before the tool has done anything.

Can you send the customer something the same day?

The bid is only half the job. Winning it usually comes down to whether a written, professional-looking proposal lands in the customer's inbox before your competitor's does.

Head-to-head comparisons

Bid Buddy vs Joist
Joist is a well-known mobile estimating and invoicing app for contractors. See how it lines up against a bidding tool built around true-margin math and an AI that interviews you.

Where Bid Buddy stands

Prices every bid with the true-margin formula: bid = cost ÷ (1 − margin), and shows you the effective markup alongside it.
Overhead is entered as its own percentage and applied before profit, so it is never absorbed silently.
Talk your way through a bid — Bid Buddy AI asks the questions instead of handing you an empty form.
Free calculator with no account required; Pro is $9.99/month with a 3-day free trial and a locked founding-member rate.
Pro adds saved bids, reusable templates, customer records, AI-written proposals, and emailing the finished bid to the customer.
Runs in your phone's browser — nothing to install on a job site with one bar of signal.

Try the free calculator See Pro pricing

Product names and features referenced here belong to their respective owners and are described for comparison only. Competitor plans and pricing change — check their site for current details.