Steel estimating has always been a painstaking, manual process. Estimators spend hours hunched over blueprints, counting every beam, column, and brace by hand. One missed member or transposed number can throw off an entire bid.
SteelFlo changes that.
The Problem
Small-to-mid structural steel fabricators face a brutal reality: estimating takes too long and costs too much. A typical structural steel takeoff involves:
- Printing or scrolling through dozens of blueprint pages
- Manually identifying every steel member label
- Counting each occurrence across plans, sections, and details
- Cross-referencing AISC tables for weights
- Building a BOM in a spreadsheet
- Running pricing calculations
This process can take 8-12 hours for a medium-sized project. And if you lose the bid, that time is gone.
How SteelFlo Works
SteelFlo uses AI to automate the most tedious parts of the takeoff process:
- Upload your PDF --- Drop your structural drawings into SteelFlo
- AI detection --- Our pipeline scans every page, identifying steel member labels and their locations
- Review and verify --- See every detection overlaid on the original drawing. Confirm or reject with one click.
- Export your BOM --- Download a clean bill of materials with member types, counts, and weights
The entire process takes minutes, not hours.
Built for Fabricators
We did not build SteelFlo in a vacuum. We worked directly with structural steel estimators to understand their workflow, their pain points, and what they actually need from a takeoff tool.
That is why SteelFlo follows a simple principle: the count is the number of boxes. Every bounding box on a drawing represents one physical piece of steel. No inference, no schedule parsing, no guesswork.
Get Started
SteelFlo is available now. Upload your first blueprint and see the difference AI-powered estimating can make for your shop.
Start your free trial and run your first takeoff today.