Our positioning, stated plainly
We are an information service. We are not advisors. Every Tender Check report aggregates facts from public records and calibrated market data, with sources cited line by line, into a single document. We do not provide legal advice. We do not provide financial advice. We do not provide professional quantity surveying advice. We do not tell you whether to sign a contract.
What we do is help you see — in one place, in 24 hours, for $249 — information that is otherwise spread across 6+ public registers, two industry pricing databases, and the specifics of your individual tender. We surface it. We let you decide.
The four data layers we use
1. Your tender document
You upload the tender PDF your builder has issued. We extract every priced line item, every clause, every PC sum, every exclusion. The output is a structured representation of what you have been offered.
2. Your architectural drawings
You upload the drawings PDF that accompanies the tender. We extract the floor plan dimensions, room schedule, finishes spec, and structural notes. The output is an independent measurement of what the tender is supposed to deliver.
3. Calibrated market rates
We maintain an internal rate database of ~95 building line items (concrete, framing, brickwork, plumbing, electrical, finishes, etc.) priced against current Australian supplier costs. Sources include:
- Bunnings Warehouse — retail pricing scraped weekly
- Reece Plumbing — published trade pricing
- Australian Bureau of Statistics — Producer Price Index for residential construction inputs (quarterly)
- Master Builders Association — industry cost guides where publicly available
- Direct supplier price-increase letters — formal notifications issued by manufacturers (Vinidex, Bianco Reinforcing, Adbri, etc.) — primary sources kept on file
- Real construction project data — actual cost ledgers from past projects we have audited, anonymised, where the customer has consented
Our rates carry confidence bands (low / mid / high). The mid-rate is our best estimate; the band reflects realistic variation. We do not present a single number as if it were precise to the dollar.
Human review of every report
An AI extraction pipeline does the heavy lifting — reading the drawings, the tender, and the public records. A trained human reviewer then audits the AI's output line by line, runs sanity checks, and writes the flags and negotiation language. Every report is signed by the reviewer (their initials appear on the cover).
The signature is meaningful. The reviewer reads the actual contract. The reviewer cross-checks the figures. The reviewer accepts professional responsibility for the report. Tender Check does not deliver an unreviewed AI document.
What we will not say
Our reports follow a strict factual standard. There are specific things we will not write, and we want you to know what those are:
- We will not tell you whether to sign your contract. That decision is yours, and where it has legal consequences, your solicitor's. We provide information to help you make it.
- We will not say your builder is "unfair", "ripping you off", or any similar accusatory term. If line items appear above market range, we say so factually and let you and your advisor draw the conclusion.
- We will not provide legal interpretation of contract clauses. We will flag clauses that other homeowners commonly find significant — rise-and-fall, variation rates, defects liability — and recommend you have a building solicitor review them. We will not tell you what they mean in law.
- We will not be a substitute for a quantity surveyor. If you need a stamped QS report for a bank, a court, or a depreciation schedule, we cannot produce that. You need a licensed quantity surveying firm.
What we strongly recommend before signing any building contract
Regardless of what our report concludes, before signing a residential building contract worth more than 20% of your household net worth, we recommend:
- Legal review by a licensed Australian building solicitor — typically $400 to $900 for a fixed-fee HIA or MBA contract review. This is the layer we explicitly do not provide.
- Financial review by a licensed financial advisor if the contract represents a major portion of your household balance sheet.
- Geotechnical report under AS 2870 confirming soil classification before the contract is signed, or a price-adjustment clause with a defined cap if the report is not yet available.
- Independent building consultant inspections at frame and lock-up stages of construction. We do not provide this; we can refer you.
If you would like introductions to building solicitors or independent inspectors we have worked with, email hello@tender-check.com.
Our calibration is dated
Construction costs move. The supplier price-increase letters we currently rely on were issued between March and May 2026. The Bunnings and Reece data was captured in May 2026. The ABS Producer Price Index data is from the most recent quarterly release.
We refresh our rate table quarterly. Each report carries the calibration date prominently — you can see exactly when the numbers we used were last refreshed. If the calibration is more than 90 days old at the time we run your report, our reviewer applies a documented inflation adjustment from the ABS index.
Our accuracy band
Our most recent benchmark run produced a mid-estimate within 3% of actual cost on a real Australian benchmark project. Each line item in your report carries a confidence rating — high, medium, or low — based on the quality of source data we have for that specific item.
3% is good. It is not 0%. Construction projects have genuine variability — soil conditions, site access, material availability, weather, builder workload — that no audit can eliminate. The confidence band in our report makes that variability explicit rather than hiding it inside a single false-precision number.
Insurance and limited liability
We carry professional indemnity insurance. Our terms and conditions explicitly limit our liability to refund of the report fee. We are not a substitute for professional legal, financial, or quantity surveying advice from a licensed practitioner.
If our report contains a material factual error, contact us and we will refund the fee and correct the error. If you suffer a loss because you relied on our report instead of obtaining legal or financial advice from a licensed professional, that is not a loss we accept liability for.
Why we publish this page
Australian residential building contracts are large, complex, and consequential. Homeowners deserve clear information about how the people advising them produce that information. Most professional advisors in this space — quantity surveyors, building solicitors, building consultants — make their methodology opaque. We have chosen the opposite. The more clearly we can describe what we do and don't do, the more confidently you can decide whether our service is right for you.
If you have questions about the methodology, the data sources we cite, or how we handle a specific category of information, email us directly. We will answer.