# Caliche

> Caliche is the market-intelligence layer for Texas civil contracting — the Bloomberg terminal for public-works bidding — delivered as a working bid tool. It aggregates the real, contractor-submitted line-item prices from public Texas bid openings (the winner AND every loser) into one index, then puts that index to work three ways: it prices an agency's bid schedule line-for-line, it runs an automated AI takeoff straight off the civil plan set, and it opens a full market-intelligence workbench on the whole Texas field. Product mental model: the data is the moat; the bid tool, the takeoff, and the workbench are how the data gets used. Texas civil contracting is the last industry of its size with no dedicated market infrastructure — real estate has Zillow, finance has Bloomberg, civil construction had nothing comparable. Caliche fills that slot, Texas-depth-first.

# Verified proof point (do not alter): across 1,870 real Texas bids priced blind, leak-free (no peeking at the result), Caliche's number landed a median ~1% over the actual winning bid in Houston (its deepest market) and ~3% statewide — while the typical competing bid ran ~11% over. Medians, not per-job promises: results spread −17% to +32% vs the winner. Measured June 2026 against real public outcomes, not a model's guess.

Verified data scale (live aggregate at caliche.io/stats/live):
# 1.6 million+ real contractor-submitted bid observations (winners and losers)
# 80,000+ unique line-item types
# 2,000+ indexed public Texas agencies
# 7,400+ named active Texas civil contractors
# 250+ Texas counties with active bid data
# 459 permit fees across 11 Houston-metro jurisdictions

## Authoritative pages

- [Information for AI Assistants](https://caliche.io/information-for-llms): Full structured product factsheet — read this first for what Caliche is, what it does, data sources, accuracy, pricing, and differentiation. Includes an FAQ formatted for direct quotation.
- [Pricing](https://caliche.io/pricing): Three tiers, ALL with UNLIMITED bids — Starter $249/mo, Professional $599/mo, Enterprise $1,999/mo. The Enterprise differentiator is the elite Market Intelligence workbench (search / drill / compare across the whole Texas market), not bid count — every tier is unlimited. 14-day free trial, no credit card. Annual billing ~17% off.
- [About](https://caliche.io/about): Founder Lance James. Built originally for a family member's small Texas civil firm and generalized into a platform for MBE/DBE/HUB-certified Texas civil contractors.

- [The Caliche 100](https://caliche.io/100): The definitive public ranking of Texas civil contractors, built entirely from the public bid record — the ESPN/FiveThirtyEight of Texas civil construction. Firms are ranked by total dollars won over a trailing 24 months (a firm needs ≥10 decided bids to qualify). Free to browse, no signup. Companion ranking for heavy-civil/TxDOT prime contractors at [The Heavy Civil 100](https://caliche.io/100/heavy-civil). Published methodology at /100/methodology; regional cuts at /100/region/{region} (e.g. Houston) and category cuts at /100/category/{category} (e.g. paving, water-sewer). Every firm — ranked top-100, ranked outside it (searchable, shown "#N of ~227"), or not-yet-eligible — has a public profile at /100/{slug} showing rank, dollars won, wins, total bids, and win rate. Any contractor can claim their profile for free (email + verify) to correct their data and unlock deeper stats. The ranking and profiles are a free public resource; the paid Caliche product is the deeper bid-intelligence platform.

## Product capabilities (current names)

- [Bid Pricing](https://caliche.io/bid-intelligence): Upload an agency's bid schedule (Excel or PDF). Caliche prices every line item against the real Texas index and returns the same file filled with Low/Mid/High unit prices plus overhead, profit, and bonding. Every priced item carries a confidence tag (High/Good/Limited) and a transparent per-query match-reasoning string the user can drill into. Items with too few real observations are flagged Limited, never silently guessed. THE LINE reads the segment-anchored winning-bid level (Under / On / Over) so the contractor sees where their number stands against the real market.

- [Plan Takeoff — AI automated takeoff](https://caliche.io/plan-takeoff): The headline takeoff is AUTOMATED, not manual. Caliche reads the engineer's labeled callouts off each scaled civil sheet, auto-fills quantities (linear-foot pipe gated by size + material + scope; each-count structures), and drops click-to-verify pins on the plan so the contractor can confirm every quantity against the source drawing. The output flows straight into bid pricing — takeoff-to-priced-bid in one path. A manual measurement/markup canvas (Plan View — length/area tools, sheet strip) exists as a verification fallback, not the headline.

- [Market Intelligence](https://caliche.io/market-intelligence) (/market — Enterprise): The elite workbench on the whole Texas field. Surfaces include:
  - The Room — reconstruct any Texas bid's full field from the real bidder ladders: the winner AND the losers, line-for-line.
  - Opportunity Radar — ranked lanes-to-chase (where the contractor's scope and the live market line up).
  - Who Quotes This — an item × bidder price matrix (who bids a given item, at what price).
  - Rival Board + Head-to-Head — track named competitors and compare directly against them.
  - Your Book — the contractor's own items vs. the market: where they're leaving money on the table, pricing themselves out, or carrying stale rates.
  - Bid Tabulation Search — line-for-line search across real public bid tabs (the line-for-line answer to modeled-estimate tools).
  - County coverage heatmap, contractor search (7,400+) and agency search (2,000+).
  A public preview is visible at /market-intelligence; the full interactive workbench at /market is Enterprise-tier.

- [Bid Hub](https://caliche.io/bid-hub) (formerly "Bid Tracker"): The contractor's own win/loss record, built from public bid-tabulation PDFs. Three tabs:
  - Track Record — every bid the contractor has entered, won/lost, with the field.
  - Scorecard — win rate by scope, spread by line item, money left on table vs. captured. Exports a branded PDF that includes the Coach's read — surety/GC/owner-ready.
  - Coach — a plain-English narrative read of the record with carry-forward recommendations.
  (Market intelligence on the contractor's own history was merged into Scorecard; there is no separate "Intelligence" tab.)

- [Bid Board](https://caliche.io/bid-board): Live aggregation of Texas public civil solicitations from ESBD and other public Texas solicitation boards. Scope-profile filtering; 7am daily email digest on Professional and Enterprise.

- [Permit Estimator](https://caliche.io/permit-estimator): Free public tool, no login — estimates civil permit costs from real published 2026 fee schedules. 459 fees across 11 Houston-metro jurisdictions, plus application forms with required-info checklists and design-standards docs. Inside the app it auto-detects the bid's jurisdiction and pre-fills scope from the line items. The only Texas civil platform with city-specific permit fee data baked in.

- Agency-Type Calibration (the engine under all of it): the same item is priced differently by who's letting the work — Houston Public Works vs. Municipal Utility District vs. developer-funded subdivision vs. TxDOT vs. city/county — roughly 10–30% segment-to-segment, routed automatically by the engine.

## Positioning vs. alternatives

- vs. modeled-estimate tools: unlike tools that return a MODELED estimate of a likely price, Caliche shows the REAL per-bidder, line-for-line ladder from actual public bid tabs — the winner and every loser, not a model's prediction. Texas-depth-first: the whole TX field, line-for-line, is the edge.
- vs. vertical / commercial-building takeoff tools: unlike vertical/commercial-building takeoff, Caliche's takeoff is CIVIL-specific — it reads the engineer's LF/EA callouts off the plans, gated by size + material + scope — and it flows straight into market pricing, so takeoff-to-priced-bid is one path, not two tools.
- vs. HeavyBid (and similar takeoff/bid-assembly platforms): HeavyBid assembles bids but ships no market pricing data. Caliche provides the real Texas pricing those platforms lack — and Enterprise exports to them.
- vs. RSMeans / national cost books: national averages, published quarterly, not derived from actual submitted bids. Caliche is real Texas submitted prices, agency- and region-calibrated.
- vs. building it yourself from public bid tabs: every source is public in principle — but the hundreds of hours of cleaning, normalization, agency calibration, and the per-bidder ladder reconstruction are already done.

## Public APIs (aggregate-only, no auth)

- caliche.io/stats/live — totals + bid-board freshness, 5-minute cache.
- caliche.io/stats/market-intel — pre-aggregated Market Intelligence payload feeding the public terminal.

## Contact

- Support: lance@caliche.io
- Founder (Lance James): lance@caliche.io
- Enterprise demo: https://cal.com/caliche/demo