Why RenoCalc exists
I built this because I was sick of losing my evenings.
My name is Pindi. I've been in construction for thirty-two years. Started as a labourer at seventeen, learned plastering, picked up carpentry, spent a decade running my own team across the West Midlands. I know what a renovation job looks like at every stage — from the first site visit to the snagging list.
I also know what quoting looks like. Or rather, I know what it used to look like: a notebook full of measurements, a spreadsheet I'd built myself over years, a calculator, and a quiet house because everyone else had gone to bed. I'd spend four hours on a quote that might win me a job worth fifteen grand, or might not. Either way, I'd spent four hours on it. And then I'd do it again the next night.
The thing that really used to frustrate me wasn't the time — it was the information. I had all the information I needed. I'd walked the job, I knew the scope, I knew my rates. The floor plan was sitting in front of me. Everything I needed to produce an accurate, detailed quote was right there. But getting it out of my head and into a professional document took hours of manual work that, frankly, a computer should have been doing.
So I built RenoCalc. Not because I was a tech entrepreneur looking for an opportunity. Because I was a builder who was sick of the problem and decided to do something about it. I wanted to be able to do a site visit, take a few photos, upload the floor plan, and have a proper quote ready before I'd driven back. I wanted the numbers to be right, not an approximation. I wanted the documents to look professional, not like something knocked up in Word at midnight.
It took a few years to build it properly. The material price library alone — keeping UK rates accurate and regional — is a substantial ongoing piece of work. The forty thousand formulas in the spreadsheet exist because real renovation costing is genuinely complex: materials and labour interact differently across trades, waste factors vary, labour rates shift by region and trade scarcity. We built it so that the complexity is handled by the software, not by you.
Today there are builders using RenoCalc on site, on their phones, before they've left the property. There are property developers using it to run feasibility on potential acquisitions before they make an offer. There are small contractors using it to quote work they'd previously have passed on because the quoting overhead wasn't worth it. There are landlords using it to budget HMO conversions. There are people in Australia, in Ireland, in the UAE, doing renovation estimates they couldn't easily do before.
That's the product. It's made by someone who has spent more time on building sites than in front of a computer. The prices are right because I know what things cost. The trades are right because I know how they sequence. The documents are right because I know what clients actually need to see before they'll sign off. This isn't software built by people who've observed construction from the outside. It's built from the inside, by someone who lived the problem for two decades before sitting down to solve it.
Pindi Sahota
Builder & Founder · 32 years on the tools
32+ years on the tools