Why SelfConstruct

Six differences that are worth the switch, and one list of people this is the wrong tool for. Every difference below ends with the screen in the live demo where you can check it yourself — the demo is the real application running a fictional builder, with no sign-up in front of it.

Try the live demo → Start SelfConstruct

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The six differences

ONEEverything is connected — estimate, budget, bill, books

Approve an estimate and it becomes that job's budget and its schedule of values. Purchase orders and vendor bills land on the same cost codes the estimate used, so the budget page fills itself in as the job is bought out. Draw invoices are billed against that schedule of values, and the invoice, the payment and the bill each post into the general ledger.

The point is not that the modules exist. It is that a number is entered once and the next screen already knows it — no export, no monthly sync, no evening spent making two systems agree.

Prove it: open Estimates in the demo, then Budget on the same job → Approving an estimate says so on the screen: it becomes the budget baseline and the source for draw invoicing.

TWOReal books, inside the system that ran the job

A full double-entry general ledger is part of the product, not an integration: chart of accounts, bank import, reconciliation, journal entries, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, trial balance, and an accountant package at tax time. Job costing and the financial statements read the same postings, so the profit on a job and the profit on the company are the same arithmetic.

The honest limits, in the same breath: it does not run payroll and it does not file sales or use tax, and it has not yet been reviewed by an independent construction CPA. The accountants' page states those limits in full, and we would rather you read them before you buy than discover them in April.

Prove it: open Accounting in the demo — chart of accounts, journal, reconciliation, statements → 24 reports ship with the product, and the accounting ones are in that library.

THREEUnlimited users, at one company price

$299 a month per company buys the system for that company, not a seat for a person. Office logins, crew codes, subcontractor codes and client portals are all included, and there is no seat count anywhere in the software to bump into — adding your new lead carpenter is a two-minute administrative act, not a purchasing decision.

Priced per seat, the software gets more expensive exactly when you grow, which quietly teaches a company to keep people off it. That is the opposite of what a shared system is for.

Prove it: open Team in the demo and add people — nothing counts them → The price on the pricing page does not change when you add people. What the plan limits is storage: 50 GB of files and records per company is included, then $10 a month for each extra 10 GB.

FOURYour own private instance, branded as your company

Each company gets a complete, separate system: its own database, its own subdomain, its own sign-in. Your numbers are not rows in a shared table beside another builder's. Your logo and company name are what your clients, crews and trade partners see on the portals, the bids, the invoices and the email — SelfConstruct stays in the background.

Prove it: open Settings in the demo and look at the company branding → The demo itself runs on its own instance at demo.selfconstruct.app, which is the same arrangement your company would get.

FIVEAI that does the office work, not chat

It reads your documents and your own cost history and hands back a finished piece of work: a sectioned, priced bid drafted from a plan set; a reply to a plan-review letter with the code sections cited for you to verify; a receipt photographed on site, read, coded to the job, and ready for you to post.

In the demo company it compared a $910,000 bid against the builder's own cost history and flagged an electrical section priced for a 200A service while the scope promised a 400A upgrade — $6,800. Every task shows what it cost to run; a $25/month allowance is included in the plan.

Prove it: open the AI Workspace in the demo and read the finished task → The task, its output and its metered cost are all on the screen — that is the whole point of showing it.

SIXYou can leave with your data

Your project history is a company asset. From Settings you can take a full company export — a byte-for-byte copy of the database, every uploaded file, every table as CSV, and a manifest with a checksum for each one. Month to month, no exit fee; if you cancel we hand you the same copy and delete the instance.

Prove it: the security page describes the export and where it lives → This is the one of the six whose proof is a page rather than a demo screen — an export runs against your own instance, and the public demo is view-only.

Not a seat. A system.

Your own private instance,
branded as your company

Big-SaaS platforms rent you seats in a shared cloud. SelfConstruct sets up a complete, separate system for each company — your database, your subdomain, your logo on everything a client ever sees.

🔒

Single-tenant by design

Your company runs in its own instance with its own database. No shared tables, no cross-tenant anything. Your numbers live alone.

🎨

White-labeled to you

yourcompany.selfconstruct.app — your logo and name on every bid, invoice, portal and email your clients touch. SelfConstruct stays in the background.

📦

Leave with everything

If you ever go, you get your complete database and files handed over. Your project history is a company asset, not a hostage.

🔒 Single-tenant isolation, HTTPS with HSTS, two-factor authentication, scoped portals, time-limited support access, and encrypted sealed offsite backups. No independent penetration test or SOC 2 audit yet — we say so.

Read the security overview →

Who SelfConstruct is for

A good fit

Custom home builders — long jobs, selections and allowances, draws, an owner who wants to see where the money went while the job is still open.
General contractors — many trade partners to schedule, buy out and pay, with retainage and lien waivers on both sides.
Remodelers and design-build firms — change orders that have to be priced, approved and folded into the contract total without an argument.
Specialty and trade contractors doing project work — concrete, pools, decks, outdoor living, excavation: a bid, a sequence, a completion.
Growing construction companies — the ones where the office has outrun the spreadsheet and adding another person should not add another bill.

Probably the wrong tool

Enterprise megaproject portfolios. If you need programme-level portfolio management across dozens of entities, procurement workflows with formal bid tabulation and multi-company consolidation, this is not built for that shape of company.
Recurring service and dispatch businesses. There is no route dispatch, no maintenance contract, no recurring billing. If your revenue is monthly service accounts, another tool fits better — even if you also build.
Companies that need payroll tax filing. Time is tracked and costed to the job, and hours export for payroll — but SelfConstruct does not run payroll, does not file payroll or sales tax, and does not produce certified payroll reports. Your payroll provider keeps that work.
Single-feature buyers. If you want only a scheduler, or only an estimating tool, and you intend to keep every other system you have, you will pay for a whole office and use a corner of it.

Two more things we would rather say up front. There are no customer testimonials on this site: when there are customers to quote, we will quote them by name and not before. And buying is a conversation today — a person provisions the instance and puts your branding on it, the company itself you set up in the app's Setup Center, and a live walkthrough for your team is optional — so "Start SelfConstruct" opens a conversation rather than a checkout.

Already running something else? Moving your company over says which of your lists import, how your opening balances are set on a cutover date you pick, and — the part worth reading first — what does not come across at all.

See it working right now

The live demo is a fictional construction company you can click through end to end, including a working client portal — the whole product, running, view-only, so nothing you click can break it. Pricing is published on the site: $299/mo per company, unlimited users, 50 GB of storage included.