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One pricing engine, everywhere
Discounts, taxes, design fees, surtax — computed once, displayed identically in the grid, the proposal, the AI prompt, and the customer portal.
CAST YOUR NET · LIFT YOUR WORK Technology Preview
Quote it. Design it. Install it. Bill it. One workspace.
SEE WHAT YOUR CUSTOMER GETS · SAMPLE PDFS
A new proposal design we're finishing. Clients and prices are made up. All samples
BidGlory is the end-to-end bid workspace for AV integrators, electricians, and project-based specialty trades — from the first walkthrough to the signed proposal, the field install, and the final invoice.
- One pricing engine. The number on the proposal cover always matches the grid.
- Two estimators on the same bid. Zero silent overwrites.
- AI drafts the proposal. The estimator approves before send.
- NEC Article 220, panel schedules, plan takeoff. Built in.
★ ASK US RIGHT NOW
Two chats. Straight answers, no waiting.
Both are AI assistants that answer only from what we've actually published — every answer shows its source. Neither will guess, and a real person is one click away in either.
THE PROBLEM
The same project lives in five places — and nothing reconciles.
A spreadsheet for the bid, a Word doc for the proposal, a PDF plan for the takeoff, a shared inbox for client questions, a notes app for what got installed. Quantities drift. Labor estimates get overwritten. A discount applied in the bid never makes it to the printed proposal. Two estimators silently overwrite each other.
Today
- ✕A spreadsheet for the bid.
- ✕A Word doc for the proposal.
- ✕A PDF plan for the takeoff.
- ✕A shared inbox for client questions.
- ✕A notes app for what got installed.
- ✕Two estimators silently overwrite each other.
With BidGlory
- ✓One workspace from walkthrough → invoice.
- ✓One pricing engine — identical numbers everywhere.
- ✓Plan takeoff → bid items in two clicks.
- ✓Customer portal in the audit trail, not a forgotten email thread.
- ✓Two estimators editing live — no lost edits.
- ✓AI drafts the proposal. The estimator ships it.
WE READ 500 REVIEWS OF 11 ESTIMATING AND BIDDING TOOLS
What estimators complain about in electrical and low-voltage bidding software, and what BidGlory does instead.
Public reviews of electrical, low-voltage and AV estimating software from electrical contractors, low-voltage shops and AV integrators, sorted by how often each complaint comes up. Here's our answer to each one. More on electrical estimating software and electrical bidding software.
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Takeoff is slow and error-prone 91 reviews
The fastest takeoff is the one you already did on your last job.
Build bids by room with room templates and Room-Tally, drop in packages that expand into all their parts, and copy lines from past bids. BidMagic bids import directly.
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Cost and licensing 50 reviews
Priced per install, never per seat. Go ahead and hire the estimator.
No per-seat fee, so adding estimators, techs and portal clients doesn't move the bill. Free and open source to self-host for companies under $1M a year in sales; hosting from $299 a month. See pricing.
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Steep learning curve 45 reviews
Switching estimating software shouldn't mean starting over.
Built for BidMagic users: the same database, pricing math that matches exactly, and imports for clients, products and room templates.
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Clunky, too many clicks 44 reviews
Good, Better, Best in one bid, not three.
Power Search across your catalog, Good/Better/Best options in one bid, duplicate a bid with or without fresh pricing, and save versions to compare.
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Catalog and price upkeep 37 reviews
Your catalog should price the way you do, down to the fourth decimal.
Products, manufacturers, suppliers and price levels in one catalog, with custom items, per-supplier markups and 4-decimal unit prices.
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Saves and team edits go wrong 34 reviews
Two estimators, one bid, no overwritten work.
Live presence shows who else is in a bid, and BidGlory refuses a save that would overwrite someone else's newer change.
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Locked to one computer 28 reviews
Your bids shouldn't live on one laptop.
A web app with nothing to install. The iPhone and iPad app opens bids, edits lines, packages, Good/Better/Best and Room-Tally, and line edits made offline sync when you reconnect.
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Doesn't connect to other tools 20 reviews
Send the bid, get the signature, skip the email chain.
Customer share links with a PDF, a customer portal with typed-name sign and approve, and an open JSON API. ERPNext accounting integration works today.
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Weak reports and outputs 17 reviews
The proposal is the product your customer actually sees.
Word and PDF proposals with area totals, phase filters and a system summary, plus purchase orders and sales and pipeline reports.
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Slow support 9 reviews
The people who wrote it answer the phone.
Support runs on California time, and the same developers who build BidGlory answer it.
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Proposals look unprofessional 5 reviews
Bad proposals lose jobs good estimates won.
36 proposal templates with cover pages, product images and details, a BidSketch diagram page and panel schedule pages. See sample proposals.
For electrical shops, too: panel schedules with a printable PDF, phase-balance warnings, and permits, inspections, checklists and photos on the job.
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT
Vertical depth, not horizontal sprawl.
The things a generic CRM or a bookkeeping app will never do — built in.
⇄
Real-time collab with safety
Live presence chip shows who else is in. Optimistic concurrency turns silent overwrites into a “Reload to see Bob's edits” banner.
✦
AI that respects the operator
Cover letters, scope text, combos, labor sanity checks — generated as drafts the estimator approves. Never auto-shipped.
⚡
NEC Article 220 load calc
Panel schedules, the NEC 2023 Article 220 load calc (standard and optional methods, code reference on every line) and phase balance — service sizing inside the bid.
⌖
Plan takeoff canvas
Upload the plan PDF, place a marker per device, draw the rooms — counts per room update live. Review the counts and add them to the bid as lines.
⛨
Customer portal, integrated
Clients sign in to the revision you sent, ask about a line, request changes, or sign & approve — every step on the bid's activity timeline.
⌬
Agentic via MCP
An MCP server with read and draft scopes. Claude Code and Claude Desktop can list bids, search the catalog, and propose lines that wait on Agent drafts. No approve_draft tool ships — LLMs can't promote their own writes.
A LOOK INSIDE
The grid, the proposal, the plan, the portal.
ON IPHONE AND IPAD
The BidGlory app, open on the same bid: rooms and lines, the product catalog, totals and tax.
Watch it in motion — 90 seconds
AI ASSISTANCE
AI drafts the proposal. The estimator ships it.
The fastest first draft you've ever shipped — but nothing reaches the customer until you've reviewed it.
- AI proposal drafter. Cover letter + scope of work + install notes from the bid contents. First draft in seconds.
- Combo suggester. Catches the missing wire / mount / bracket before the customer does.
- Labor sanity check. Flags rooms where labor hours look off for the items selected.
- Good / Better / Best. Generates tier options for any line item — structured upsell, not freeform negotiation.
- Approval gate. Proposal export blocked until AI-generated text is reviewed.
BYO LLM. Works with any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — self-hosted or cloud. No LLM configured? AI panels stay quiet; everything else still works.
CUSTOMER PORTAL
Integrated, not bolted on.
Clients log in with email and password to read the revision you sent, ask about a line, request changes, or sign & approve. Every step lands on the bid's activity timeline — not in a forgotten email thread.
- Inline proposal comments — your team replies in the same bid.
- Accept-with-signature or request-changes flow.
- Share-token links for one-off read-only views without provisioning an account.
- Full audit log: who saw what, when, from where.
HOW WE DIFFER
The other tools you're considering.
We'd rather you self-select. If one of these fits better, use it.
| Tool | What they do | Where BidGlory wins |
|---|---|---|
| BidMagic (company ceased business 2023) | The AV bid tool a generation of integrators ran their shops on. The company behind it ceased doing business in 2023 — no updates, no support, no path forward. Operators keep telling us they still can't find anything better. | We're the team that was hired to build BidMagic — as its technical lead — and BidGlory is our own product from a totally separate company. It's compatible with BidMagic databases and proposal templates: restore your .bak, keep every bid, client, and product you've ever entered. |
| D-Tools + Portal.io (merged Aug 2026) | The long-standing AV bid + design incumbent and the newer web-native Portal.io, now one company running three separate products: D-Tools SI (the FileMaker Pro desktop client), D-Tools Cloud (the same FileMaker stack through the browser), and Portal.io. What the merger changes. | One system, not three products. Browser-native from day one: no FileMaker license, no Windows Server, no sync model, so the proposal number and the bid number are the same calculation. Plus full electrical depth (NEC Article 220 load calc, panel schedules, three-phase balance), human-gated AI drafting, and a portable .bgbid export so your data is never trapped in our cloud. |
| JobTread / ServiceTitan | General-purpose contracting CRMs — generic project + dispatch + invoicing. | Vertical depth: NEC Article 220 load calc, panel schedules, three-phase balance, plan takeoff. |
| QuickBooks + spreadsheets | The status quo for most small integrators — bookkeeping plus everything else in Excel. | Anything that isn't bookkeeping. You stop retyping the same number into five tools. |
| Houzz Pro / Buildertrend | Residential contracting — kitchens, baths, GC work. | AV / electrical specificity — combos, alternatives, lighting + electrical engineering fields on every product. |
| Every other AV bid tool | Closed product surface — your data is whatever a human types into the UI. Agents need not apply. | Native MCP server, read and draft scopes. Claude Code and Claude Desktop can read bids, search the catalog, and propose lines and proposal text — every call logged with its arguments hashed. No approve_draft tool ships; a person approves every draft. |
STRAIGHT TALK
What BidGlory isn't trying to be.
We'd rather you self-select out now than be disappointed in month two.
It's vertical software.
Built for AV integrators, electricians, and project-based specialty trades. Not a generic CRM. Not a general bookkeeping app.
Onboarding takes 1–3 weeks.
Initial setup includes catalog import and proposal-template configuration. A finite project, not an ongoing burden.
Single-tenant today.
One company per install. Multi-pod horizontal scale-out is on the engineering roadmap — not shipped yet.
AI is optional.
Needs an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Self-hosted LLMs work. Cloud LLMs work. No LLM = AI panels stay quiet, everything else is unaffected.
MADE BY PROJECTTHUNDER
BidGlory is built and maintained by ProjectThunder, a senior software studio in business since 2004. It's the same engineering practice behind their custom software development, their agentic AI systems, and the MCP server for agents that ships inside their open-core commerce engine — the same .NET rigor and audit-logged, human-gated AI, applied to the AV and electrical trades.
★ FREE 30-MINUTE DEMO
Stop retyping the same number into five tools.
Bring a real recent proposal to your demo. 30 minutes. Free. No card.