Fresco
AI copilot that reads Division 8 door schedules, plans, and specs and produces door, frame, and hardware takeoffs in minutes
If Division 8 estimating is your whole business, Fresco attacks the single most expensive hour in your week: counting doors, frames, and hardware and reconciling the schedule against the plans and the 087100 spec. At $49/mo for Pro it undercuts what a full takeoff suite seat costs, and that is the right comparison — Fresco is not competing with Bluebeam Revu or PlanSwift on markup, it is competing with an estimator's afternoon. Try the free tier on one project you already know the answer to, then check its door count against the one you did by hand. If it holds on a set that is not clean, the Pro $49/mo pays for itself on the first bid. If your work drifts outside Division 8, it will not
Verified 10d ago · liveness 71/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/fresco
- Division 8 door and hardware subcontractors
- Commercial door and frame estimators
- Door and hardware distributors running quotes without an estimating department
- Small to mid-size contractors where one person handles estimating and PM
- Residential or DIY homeowners
- Estimators working outside Division 8 scopes
- General contractors needing multi-division takeoff
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Skip Fresco if your takeoffs span multiple CSI divisions or you need drawing markup in the same tool — Fresco extracts Division 8 door, frame, and hardware quantities and pairs with your existing markup software rather than replacing it.
At $49/mo for Pro, Fresco sits well below a seat of a general takeoff suite like Bluebeam Revu or PlanSwift, which is the right frame — you are buying back estimator hours, not a drawing environment. It is priced for a small door and hardware subcontractor or a distributorship where one person runs quotes. Larger firms with a dedicated estimating department should compare it against a per-seat enterprise takeoff contract before standardizing.
In short
Fresco — AI copilot that reads Division 8 door schedules, plans, and specs and produces door, frame, and hardware takeoffs in minutes. Best for Division 8 door and hardware subcontractors, Commercial door and frame estimators, Door and hardware distributors running quotes without an estimating department. Free to start; paid plans from $49/mo.
What's new in Fresco
Checked yesterdayAcross the latest 3 updates: 3 news mentions.
The Institutional Division 8 Takeoff: What Owner Standards Ask That a Project Spec Doesn't
Fresco argues institutional Division 8 takeoffs run on owner standards rather than project specs, so the hardware set shifts from something you extract to something you author — using Cornell, Michigan State, and a city fire station as published examples.
Door Takeoff Without an Estimating Department: What Distributors Do When Reps Run the Quotes
At a distributorship the door takeoff falls to a salesperson between calls, so quote requests get sorted by how long they take instead of what they are worth. The piece examines what actually decides which quotes go out.
AI Door Takeoff: What the Software Actually Reads on a Division 8 Set
Walks through the document package Fresco opens and the order it reads them in — the door schedule, elevations, partition schedule, floor plans, and the 087100 spec — and what it pulls off each one.
What people actually say about Fresco — is it worth it?
We scanned public community sources for Fresco on Jul 3, 2026 and could not establish that the discussion we found is about this tool rather than something else sharing its name. Our own analysis of that scan says the posts were off-subject. Rather than publish a sentiment score built on the wrong subject, we publish nothing here and re-run the scan.
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Fresco? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Automatic Division 8 door, frame, and hardware (DFH) takeoff from uploaded plans
- Reads the full document package: door schedule, elevations, partition schedule, floor plans, and 087100 spec
- Reconciles door schedule against elevations and plan details to flag mismatches
- Extracts door, frame, and hardware item counts into a takeoff
- Missing-door and missing-hardware checks before bid submission
- Natural-language Q&A against the project document set
- RFI and change order drafting from project documents
- Site log generation for dailies, manpower, and safety reports
- PDF plan reading and image understanding
- Comsense workflow support
- eMullion workflow support
- SFH workflow support
- Institutional owner-standard hardware set handling (per vendor blog on Cornell, Michigan State, and city fire station standards)
- SOC 2 Type 2 certified
About Fresco
Fresco is an AI takeoff copilot built for Division 8 work — commercial door, frame, and hardware (DFH) estimating. You upload the project document set and Fresco reads the package in order: the door schedule, the elevations, the partition schedule, the floor plans, and the 087100 hardware spec, then reconciles them into a single takeoff listing every door, frame, and hardware item. That reconciliation is the point — the door schedule and the elevations disagree more often than anyone likes to admit, and Fresco's job is to surface the mismatch rather than hand you a count from one document. Contractors on the site report projects that used to take more than a day coming back in under an hour, and one Division 8 contractor describes catching 200 missed doors on a Denver job. The assistant layer goes past quantities: natural-language Q&A against the project document set, RFI and change order drafting, and site log generation for dailies, manpower, and safety. Workflow support covers Comsense, eMullion, and SFH. Fresco is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and sells a free tier plus a Pro plan at $49/mo. It extracts quantities; it does not edit drawings — pair it with Bluebeam Revu, PlanSwift, or On-Screen Takeoff if you still markup. Best fit is a door and hardware subcontractor or distributor bidding Division 8 scopes without a dedicated estimating department.
Behind the Verdict
Fresco's bet is narrowness. General-purpose AI chatbots will read a door schedule if you paste it in, but they will not know that 087100 hardware sets, partition schedules, and elevations are supposed to agree, and they will not tell you when they don't. Fresco reads the package in a defined order — door schedule, elevations, partition schedule, floor plans, then the 087100 spec — and reconciles across them. That ordering is the product, and it is why the site's customer quotes keep landing on the same theme: not raw speed alone, but confidence that nothing was missed. The Denver anecdote about 200 missed doors is the emotional core of the pitch, and it is the right one, because a missed door on a commercial job is a change order you eat. The assistant layer is a genuine second product surface. Natural-language Q&A against the project documents, RFI and change order drafting, and site log generation for dailies, manpower, and safety reports mean an estimator or PM who already has the documents loaded can get an answer without opening five PDFs. For a one-person door and hardware shop — a persona the site explicitly addresses — that is the difference between bidding three jobs a week and bidding five. Where it does not fit: Fresco extracts, it does not markup. If your workflow requires redlining a plan, dimensioning, or editing the drawing itself, you keep Bluebeam Revu, PlanSwift, or On-Screen Takeoff and run Fresco alongside. It is also Division 8-only by design — a general contractor needing multi-division takeoff will find it useless, and a residential or DIY user is not the audience at all. AI takeoffs on non-standard hardware or messy drawings still need a human check before the number goes out the door, and you should build that verification step into your process rather than assume it away. Fresco's own material frames it as a copilot, and that framing is honest: it does the count, you own the bid.
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Fresco actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
A bid invitation lands on a Friday with a 40-page set. You upload the door schedule, elevations, partition schedule, floor plans, and the 087100 spec to Fresco and run the takeoff, then answer spec questions in the assistant instead of opening each PDF.
Outcome: You get a door, frame, and hardware count you can check line by line against the schedule, and a bid that would have consumed a weekend goes out Monday morning.
Your sales reps handle quote requests between customer calls. They drop the plan set into Fresco, pull the door and hardware counts, and plug them into the budget template instead of waiting on an estimating backlog.
Outcome: Quote requests stop being sorted by how long they take, and the large jobs that used to sit at the bottom of the pile get quoted.
An owner-standard job — a university or municipal building — arrives with hardware requirements that are not in the project spec. You use Fresco to pull the base takeoff from the documents, then reconcile it against the owner's published standards.
Outcome: The base counts come in minutes, leaving your time for the part that actually needs judgment: authoring the hardware set the owner's standards require.
Use Cases
- Turn a Division 8 plan set into a complete door, frame, and hardware takeoff without hand-counting
- Reconcile the door schedule against elevations and partition schedules to catch doors the schedule omits
- Check for missing doors and hardware items before a bid goes out
- Ask spec questions against the loaded project documents instead of scrolling through PDFs
- Draft RFIs and change orders from the project document set
- Generate daily site logs, manpower reports, and safety logs
- Run quotes at a distributorship where sales reps, not estimators, handle takeoff requests
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-09-14
Limitations
- Fresco is purpose-built for Division 8 door, frame, and hardware takeoff.
- It reads and extracts from plans, schedules, and specs; it does not edit or markup drawings, so teams that redline plans still need Bluebeam Revu, PlanSwift, or On-Screen Takeoff alongside it.
- AI-generated takeoffs should be verified by a human, particularly on complex drawings, non-standard hardware, or document sets with inconsistent schedules — the vendor positions the product as a copilot rather than an autonomous estimator.
- Work outside Division 8 scopes is out of scope for the tool.
- The list of integrations documented in the scraped material is short; if your stack depends on a specific handoff, confirm it directly rather than assuming.
as of 2026-09-28
Verification history
We have re-verified Fresco 7 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-checked, vendor evidence unchanged
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-checked, vendor evidence unchanged
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 7 verification passes.
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12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Fresco tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Free
$0/mo
Ideal for
A Division 8 estimator or small shop that wants to test Fresco on a real project before committing — run a takeoff on a set whose door counts you already know.
What this tier adds
Free entry point: access to the Fresco AI takeoff copilot so you can test on your own projects, with takeoff volume limited.
Pro
$49/mo
Ideal for
A working door and hardware subcontractor or distributor running bids every week without a dedicated estimating department.
What this tier adds
Adds full Division 8 takeoff automation with unlimited takeoffs and the full AI assistant layer — RFI and change order drafting, site logs, and document Q&A.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Fresco's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
At $49/mo for Pro, Fresco sits well below a seat of a general takeoff suite like Bluebeam Revu or PlanSwift, which is the right frame — you are buying back estimator hours, not a drawing environment. It is priced for a small door and hardware subcontractor or a distributorship where one person runs quotes. Larger firms with a dedicated estimating department should compare it against a per-seat enterprise takeoff contract before standardizing.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Fresco — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
If you already have the PDF set, first value is quick: upload the package and run one takeoff — contractors on the site describe projects that used to take a day or more returning in under an hour. Budget part of that first hour to verify Fresco's counts against a takeoff you already trust. Expect under 30 minutes to get an account moving on the free tier.
Switching to or from Fresco
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From manual counting and Excel takeoff sheets: export the Fresco takeoff and map columns to your existing Excel template
- →From Bluebeam Revu or PlanSwift markup takeoffs: run Fresco for the extraction step and keep your markup tool for redlining
- →From an internal estimating spreadsheet built over years: run Fresco on one completed project first and diff its counts against your historical numbers before switching bids
- ↗To Bluebeam Revu or PlanSwift: export counts for markup and drawing-level work
- ↗To RSMeans or a labor-rate source: take the extracted quantities and price them outside Fresco
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Fresco”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Fresco” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Fresco.
Official links
Tools that pair well with Fresco
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Fresco, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Provision
AI pre-construction platform that reads drawings, specs, and contracts to catch scope gaps and contract risk before bid day.
Karmen
AI scheduling co-pilot that reads your construction documents and builds CPM schedules you can export to P6 or Microsoft Project.
HomeFront
HomeFront is an all-in-one AI-powered CRM for home service businesses that answers calls, schedules jobs, invoices clients, and posts to social media.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Fresco vs Cryptohopper
These tools serve completely different domains, so the choice is straightforward: choose Cryptohopper if you need cloud-based crypto trading automation with copy trading, AI integration, and multi-exchange support. Choose Fresco if you're a construction estimator looking to streamline takeoffs, labor lookups, and error checking using AI. There is no overlap in use cases.
Fresco vs Transfix
Transfix and Fresco serve completely different industries—freight brokerage vs. construction estimating. Pick Transfix if you're a broker/3PL needing AI-driven custom pricing with private cost models; choose Fresco if you're a construction estimator wanting to automate takeoffs and leverage AI chat on documents. No overlap in use case.
Fresco vs Bitsgap
Bitsgap and Fresco serve entirely different domains: Bitsgap is for crypto traders seeking automated bot strategies, while Fresco is an AI assistant for construction estimators. Your choice depends purely on your industry—trading vs. construction. Bitsgap offers a demo mode and lower entry price, making it great for risk-free experimentation. Fresco addresses repetitive estimating tasks with AI, but at a higher price point and narrower niche.
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