About Tender LLM
Tender LLM is a free pricing assistant for South African contractors who price tenders. It exists because
the market has a gap: small and medium contractors don't have access to the same estimating intelligence
that large firms get from in-house quantity surveyors and historical project databases.
Our approach is simple. Paste your BOQ. Get rate suggestions drawn from public construction price benchmarks,
AI estimation, and (over time) anonymised crowd data from the contractors who use the tool. Adjust your
markup. Submit your tender. Tell us if you won or lost — that feedback makes the tool smarter for everyone.
How rate suggestions work
The current beta uses a curated rate library of 70+ South African construction line items across
earthworks, concrete, pipework, roads, building, fencing, electrical and now sports surfacing
(artificial pitches, athletics tracks, all-weather courts). A subset of these rates comes from
actual priced contractor BOQs on real SA tenders — tagged
“Real tender · <ref> · <date>” in the suggestion popover.
Older rates are escalated to today's prices using SA construction CPI (currently ~6% per annum).
So a rate priced in January 2024 is automatically inflated by ~13% before it lands in your suggestion band.
The production version will add live AI rate estimation for any line item, plus a contributed rate
database that grows with every BOQ uploaded by users.
Scanned PDFs & OCR
Most South African tender packs are printed and scanned, not Excel. The OCR tab on the Build
screen runs entirely in your browser — no upload to any server — using Tesseract.js to
extract text from each page, then a heuristic table detector that pulls out item / description / unit
/ qty rows. Beta caps at 20 pages per file. The production version (premium) will handle full
documents with higher-accuracy OCR and column-aware table extraction.
Data & privacy
In this prototype, your BOQs and projects stay in your browser only — nothing is sent to any server.
When the production version launches, you'll be asked for explicit consent before any anonymised line-item
data is contributed to the shared rate database. You can opt out at any time.
Free downloads
Useful tools and templates you can grab right now — no sign-up required.
PDF
Tender Submission Checklist
8-page printable A4 · sections A–F covering admin, technical, commercial, supporting, logistics & sign-off
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Roadmap
Now (free): BOQ calculator, AI rate suggestions, project history.
Next (free): Upload supplier quotes, automatic comparison, post-tender outcome tracking.
Soon (R200/report): Full Tender Review with responsiveness score and compliance check.
Later: Team accounts, mobile app, integration with construction programmes.