Bid leveling ROI calculator
Bid leveling pays for itself in two places: the estimator hours it gives back, and the scope nobody carried that it catches before award rather than after. Move the sliders to see what both are worth against your own volume.
30 packages a month · 360 a year
Fully loaded — salary, burden, and overhead
What the gaps, exclusions, and “by others” lines cost you on a typical project once they surface as change orders
Every bid is read line by line, so the target is all of them. Dial it down and check the math still works.
Catch the missed scope on one project all year and MyLevelBid has already paid for itself 8.8× over. The other 14 projects are upside.
Extra seats beyond a plan's allowance are $20/mo each
Extra seats are $20/mo each. Need more packages? Step up a tier.
At 30 packages a month and 8 seats, the $299/mo plan pays for itself in 2 days and gives back $237 for every $1 you spend — $845,112 net and 3,420 hours for the year.
Prove it on your bids — freeIllustrative estimate. Net benefit is gross value less your annual MyLevelBid cost. Time reclaimed assumes 9.5 hours of spreadsheet leveling per bid package — the one figure the sliders don’t set.
How the number is calculated
Every assumption behind the figure above, stated. A calculator that will not show its arithmetic does not deserve to be believed.
- What does the calculator actually measure?
- Two streams. Estimating time reclaimed is your package volume multiplied by 9.5 hours per bid package and your blended hourly rate. Missed scope avoided is your project volume multiplied by the scope cost you carry per project and the share of it caught before award. The two are summed, then the annual plan cost is subtracted to give a net figure.
- Where does the figure of 9.5 hours per package come from?
- It is a fixed assumption rather than an input, covering the manual work of transcribing bids into a spreadsheet, chasing exclusions and qualifications, and rebuilding the tab when an addendum lands. It is deliberately not adjustable: an input nobody can answer off the top of their head is an input that gets abandoned, and a calculator that asks eight questions gets finished by nobody.
- Why are there so few inputs?
- Anything a visitor cannot reasonably know without looking it up is either baked in as a disclosed constant or cut. The sliders ask only for figures an estimator knows from memory — packages per year, projects per year, a blended rate, and what a missed scope item typically costs.
- How is the plan cost calculated?
- From the published pricing, not from an estimate. Plans run $199, $299 and $399 per month, including 5, 10 and 15 seats respectively, with additional seats at $20 per month. Package volume determines eligibility rather than adding a surcharge, so exceeding a tier's allowance steps you up rather than billing an overage.
- Is the result a quote?
- No. It is an estimate built from your own inputs and the assumptions stated on this page, intended to show whether the order of magnitude is worth a conversation. Nothing here is a commitment, and the scope-gap side in particular depends entirely on what your projects actually carry.
Why the second stream is the larger one
The hours are easy to believe and comparatively small. The expensive stream is the other one, because of when the cost lands rather than how big it is.
A scope gap caught during leveling is a line added to a comparison while every bidder still wants the job. The same gap caught after award is a change order negotiated with the only contractor who can now do the work. The scope is identical; the price is not, and the difference is competitive tension that no longer exists.
That is why the calculator asks what a missed item typically costs you rather than asking how many you miss. Most teams can answer the first question from memory and cannot answer the second at all — the gaps you never found are, by definition, not in anyone’s records.
See it against your own bids
The fastest way to test the number above is on a package you have already awarded.