About Caliche
Built from the bid room, not the boardroom.
I'm a sales guy who watched my cousin guess at bid prices for a living.
Caliche is a Texas civil bid pricing tool I built for my cousin Kent — an estimator at his family's Houston-area DBE civil contracting business. The same tool is now available to every Texas civil contractor who wants to bid like a 20-year veteran estimator from day one.
1.6 million+
Real TX bid observations
80,000+
Unique line items indexed
2,000+
TX public agencies indexed
~1%
Over the winner in Houston · 1,870 blind bids
How this actually happened
I've been in sales my whole career — mostly auto sales. Two years ago I went on paternity leave, and in the downtime I taught myself to build software the way you can in 2026 — talking an idea through with modern coding assistants, no formal engineering background required.
I built a couple of other tools (one of them, a lead-response system for car dealerships, is heading into a pilot with a major automaker). And then I turned to my cousin Kent. Kent works as an estimator at his family's Houston-area DBE civil contracting business — a small DBE-certified firm owned by his stepfather, the kind of 55-year-old owner-operator who's been doing this for decades, lives in his head, knows the work cold, and runs HeavyBid like he was born using it.
Kent's job included takeoffs and bid pricing — and watching him work, I saw the same gap every newer or smaller contractor sees: the big firms across the table have estimators with 20 years of Texas bid history memorized, and Kent is reading PDFs and guessing. The data those veterans have isn't secret. Every TxDOT, HPW, and MUD letting publishes every bidder's prices as a public record. It's just nobody had ever indexed it.
So I asked Kent's stepfather — a stubborn DBE owner-operator who was somewhere between intrigued and skeptical — if I could build something. He said yes. Kent and I started pulling public bid tabs, organizing them, and wiring up a pricing engine. Months later, we had a tool that priced a real bid the firm won — landing right in the range of what they actually submitted, sight unseen.
That's the story. There's no funding round, no Stanford CS degree, no in-house engineering team. There's a sales guy who learned to listen to a real DBE civil contractor's real problem and used the tools available in 2026 to build a real solution. That story is exactly what makes the tool right for MBE/DBE firms — it was built with one of you, not for some abstract market segment.
Does it actually work?
We tested it on the real job
the firm won.
A completed Houston-area MUD water-and-sewer job from late 2024 — exactly the kind of work Kent's firm bids. We priced the full 86-line schedule cold, from market data, with no peek at the outcome, then checked it against what the firm actually submitted to win. It landed right in the range of the winning bid — because it priced against real MUD data, not a national average.
But one job isn't proof. So we ran it at scale — against 1,870 real Texas bids the engine had never seen, each job's own prices stripped out first. Here's where it landed.
Founder
Lance James
Founder · Builder · Cousin to a real DBE estimator
Career sales background — mostly automotive. Started building software in 2024 after picking up the new generation of code-generation tools. Caliche is the product of asking a real Houston-area DBE civil contractor what their actual bid-day pain was, then listening hard enough to build something that helps. I'm the person you'll email when something is broken or missing. That's on purpose.
What we believe
01
Texas data, not national benchmarks
RSMeans and national cost books average prices across 50 states. A water main in Houston prices completely differently than one in Phoenix — and Houston Public Works prices it differently than a Harris County MUD across the line. Caliche is built on what Texas contractors actually submitted at public bid openings.
02
Deliver the file, not a number on a screen
Every other pricing tool shows you a price and then makes you go back to your spreadsheet and type it in. We thought that was insane. Caliche returns the same Excel file the agency sent you — every unit cost filled, markups applied, ready to review.
03
MBE/DBE firms deserve the same infrastructure as large GCs
Big general contractors have in-house estimating departments, decades of cost databases, and institutional pricing memory. Smaller MBE/DBE civil contractors don't — and they're competing for the same work every time. Caliche closes that gap.
04
Honest about what we don't know
Items Caliche can't confidently price get a Limited tag (fewer than 5 real observations) — never silently filled with bad numbers. If our data on a specific item is thin, the spread is wide and we say so. That's how contractors learn to trust a tool.
What we're not
Not a 50-person company. Not venture-backed. Not built in Silicon Valley by someone who's never priced a bid.
Yes — Caliche is early, small, and founder-led. That's a feature. The person who built it answers your email. Bug reports get fixed by the same hands that wrote the code. New requests get evaluated by the founder, not a product committee. The tradeoff for that responsiveness is we're not going to look like a big-firm tool — we're going to act like one.
Who it's for
Built with a DBE firm. Open to the whole industry.
Certified contractors — MBE, DBE, HUB — are the heart of why Caliche exists: they bid the same public contracts as the largest firms in the state, and now they can price like them too. But the ground truth it runs on serves everyone who needs to know what Texas civil work actually costs — general contractors sharpening a number, suppliers seeing where materials clear, agencies and engineers checking an estimate against what the market really bids.
The data was always public — nobody had made it usable. Today Caliche is the most complete index of real Texas civil bid pricing anywhere, and everyone prices off the same Texas ground truth.
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