Marapone Bid Leveler

01

The bid set prices its own gaps

The interesting move here isn't reading a PDF. It's this: when Sub A excludes crane hoisting and Sub B carries it as a $15,000 alternate, Sub A's gap is worth $15,000. That's a real market price — for this project, this schedule, this site, from a contractor who wants the work. Not a number from a book, and not a percentage.

So the levelling pass looks for competitor evidence first and only falls back to a local rate table for elements nobody priced. Every adjustment states which basis it used, ranked openly from strongest to weakest: priced by a competing bidder, the bidder's own alternate, your award history, the rate table, a percentage of trade value, or a figure the estimator typed. An estimator who can't say where a number came from can't use it in a negotiation, so the weakest bases are labelled as such rather than blended into a total.

02

Silence is the expensive part

An exclusion is on the record and can be priced. Silence is what reaches site unresolved, months later, with no competitive tension left — so the two are levelled the same way and flagged differently.

Around that sit the other findings: scope every bidder left out, which doesn't change who is cheapest but does change what the trade costs; allowances wearing a price tag; commercial mismatches like HST in or out, bonding, escalation and validity that expires before award; addenda nobody carried, which makes a bid a price for a different project; price-moving qualifications quoted back with the reason each one matters; and outliers still well below the field after levelling, which in this market is rarely a bargain.

03

It produces the day you were about to spend

The output is the levelling matrix as an Excel workbook — scope down the side, bidders across the top, five sheets, live formulas so an override moves the totals — plus an award recommendation written to be read by a PM who wasn't in the meeting, and one clarification letter per bidder with the reason each open item is being asked.

It also writes the subcontract scope paragraphs from the levelled position, so what levelling added back can't be quietly re-excluded after signing, and hands its numbers on: JSON to the AI Estimator, CSV to ScopeGuard, a Procore-shaped bid tab for everything else. On the demo package the low bid was $1,142,000; levelled, that bidder isn't the cheapest, and awarding on the bid form alone would have cost $84,986.