KEYBIDBuilt in the field, not in a boardroom.
Keybid was built by a contractor who bids real work for a living. Not designed from user interviews. Not "informed by industry research." Built by a guy with a bid due Thursday who got tired of losing to busywork.
Why Keybid exists
Good contractors lose jobs they priced right. Not on the number — on everything around the number. The follow-up nobody sent because the estimator was on a pre-bid walk. The addendum that sat unread for three days. The PG 76-22 pavement spec buried on sheet C8.0 of a 300-sheet set that turned a good bid into a bad one. Every sub knows these losses by name. Almost no software prevents them — because almost nobody who builds software has ever chased an award, sweated a bid day, or eaten a spec they didn't catch.
Ryan, Keybid's founder, is a working sitework contractor. He watched jobs walk out the door on silence and paperwork — his own and other people's — and decided the fix wasn't another spreadsheet. It was a bid department. So he built one. In code.
Built on real bids, not a whiteboard
Keybid started as a live bid board running real work, and it grew agents the way a company grows staff: an Intake Agent that turns any invite into a bid card, a Triage Agent that calls go/no-go with the reason in writing, Plan Intelligence that reads the sheets and catches the money flags, Reply and Follow-Up Agents that draft every email for one-tap approval, a win-probability engine built on your own history — and The Foreman, the coded brain that supervises all of it around the clock and logs every decision it makes.
Real bids go through this system every week. Every feature exists because a real bid demanded it — and every feature that didn't survive a real bid got cut.
How we operate
Three rules we won't break: the AI never invents a number — every statistic is computed from your data with plain math. You approve every word before anything represents your company. And your data is never shared — not with other contractors, not with GCs, not with anyone; export it all any time with one click.
Where we're going
Every trade, every size — from a two-person sub to a regional GC. The demo at the front door is our actual product with fictional data. Kick the tires, then put your own bids on it and tell us what's wrong with it. Founding customers steer the roadmap.
The bid board is step one. We started with bidding because that is where the work is won and lost — but it is the front door to a much bigger building. Estimating is what we are building next: quantities off the plan set, your own historical unit costs, a number you can stand behind in minutes instead of nights, with the takeoff showing its work so you can check every line. After that, the rest of the pre-construction desk — buyout and sub coverage, change orders, certified payroll and the compliance paperwork that should fill itself in.
The honest version: we intend to automate the construction back office, and we are starting where the money is decided. Every hour a contractor spends on paperwork instead of the work is an hour we mean to take back. None of that is in the box today — what you buy today is the bid board, and it works. But the first 30 companies see every module before anyone else, and what they tell us is broken is what gets built next.
Who you're actually dealing with
Not a sales team. Not a support queue. Ryan bids work for a living and he answers his own email. If something in this product is wrong, slow, or missing, write him — you will get a human back within 12–24 hours, usually faster, sometimes from the seat of a truck.
Ryan · Founder
ryan@keybid.ai