Cost estimation & schedules from an IFC — free to build, in the browser
BIMCamel's Estimate tab turns any IFC into a working schedule: pick your columns, group by storey or type, filter to what you care about, and read subtotals and a grand total as you go. It is the quantity takeoff our users already run, with the ceiling taken off — multi-level grouping, your own columns, and a report you can hand to a client.
Every browser IFC takeoff tool stops at quantities and leaves the pricing to a spreadsheet. Estimate does not: attach your own rates and it produces a priced bill of quantities as an Excel workbook or a report-grade PDF with a cover page and page numbers. Nothing to install, and building a schedule is free on every tier.
Who it's for
Solo architects and small studios — the people who get sent a consultant's IFC and need a defensible number for a client conversation this week, not a five-day modelling exercise. If you already own Revit or Archicad, their own schedules are good; the gap Estimate fills is the model someone else authored, in a format you cannot schedule without buying another desktop licence.
It is deliberately not a 5D planning suite for main contractors. There is no resource levelling, no cash-flow forecasting and no tender comparison, because those are the features that make the enterprise tools unusable for a two-person practice.
What you can do
- Build a schedule from any IFC — attributes, property sets, quantity sets, and storey / type / material context, in whatever columns you choose.
- Group by more than one thing at once (storey, then type) with subtotals at every level and a grand total that always reconciles.
- Merge identical rows into one line with a count, or keep one row per element — the two documents a schedule can be, as an explicit choice.
- See where every number came from: authored in the model, measured from geometry, or missing entirely.
- Export to Excel and CSV, or a report-grade PDF with a cover page, running headers and page numbers.
It works on models that aren't finished
Most IFCs arrive without complete quantity sets, and most cost questions arrive before the model deserves them. Estimate reads authored Qto values where they exist and measures the rest from the geometry, then labels every row with which one it used. A number you can trace is worth more than a number that merely looks confident — so nothing is silently rounded up from a gap, and elements with no quantity at all are counted and shown rather than quietly dropped.
How it compares
Desktop estimating tools — PriMus, CostX, Cubicost, Navisworks Quantification, Solibri's Information Takeoff — are mature and genuinely powerful, and priced between roughly €1,500 and €3,000 per seat per year, Windows-only, with a learning curve measured in days. They are built for quantity surveyors and main contractors.
The browser IFC tools are the other end: free or near-free, no install, and all of them stop at quantities. None lets you attach a rate and print a priced document, which is the step an architect actually needs to answer "can my client afford this?". Estimate is built to sit exactly there — the speed and price of the browser tier, with the one step the browser tier is missing.
What a subscription gets you
Building schedules is free, on every tier, with no row limit on screen and no cap on how much of the model you can look at. Exporting is free too, on every tier — Excel, PDF and CSV, every row, no cap, no account required. Free exports carry the BIMCamel mark.
Pro and Team put your own logo and title on the document — and drop the BIMCamel footer, so what reaches your client is yours. There is no separate Estimate plan: it is part of the subscription you already have, alongside validation, clash, IDS and the rest of the toolset.
Moving off Solibri Anywhere?
Solibri is retiring Anywhere, its free viewer, through 2026 — and Information Takeoff was always view-only there anyway, with extraction reserved for the paid desktop tiers. If ITO's table is the part of Solibri you actually used — pick columns, group by property values, click a row to see the components in 3D — Estimate is that interaction model in the browser: the same choose-columns, group-and-subtotal, row-to-model workflow, plus the pricing step ITO never had, free to build on any tier with nothing to install.
How the alternatives stack up
| Runs in the browser | Free to build | Priced BoQ output | Model ↔ schedule link | Typical price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACCA PriMus / PriMus-IFC | No — Windows desktop | Trial capped (~60 entities) | Yes — price-list first | No live 3D link | Per-seat desktop licence |
| CostX / Cubicost | No — Windows desktop | No | Yes — QS workbooks | Yes, in the desktop app | ≈ £2k–£5k per seat / year |
| Solibri (Information Takeoff) | No — desktop | Viewing only; extraction needs paid tiers | No — quantities only | Yes, in the desktop app | ≈ €2.7k / year |
| QTOpro | Yes | 100-row cap on free | No — no rates | No 3D view | ≈ $19 / month |
| ifcreport.app | Yes | 3 reports / month | No | No | Freemium |
| BIMCamel Estimate | Yes | Yes — free to build on every tier | Yes — your rates, markups, PDF / Excel | Yes — rows and model select each other | Included in Pro (€19 / month) |
Competitor capabilities and prices as published by the vendors, checked August 2026. Desktop tools listed for capability comparison; they remain far deeper estimating suites than a browser tool aims to be.
Frequently asked questions
Does this replace a quantity surveyor?
No, and it is not trying to. It gives an architect a defensible, traceable number early — for a feasibility conversation, an option comparison, or a sanity check before a QS is appointed. Every quantity says whether it was authored in the model or measured from geometry, precisely so the number can be interrogated rather than taken on faith.
Can I use my own rates?
Yes — that is the intended path. You can bring rates in from a spreadsheet and reuse them across models rather than rebuilding them per project. We deliberately do not try to compete with the big regional price catalogues; making your own numbers easy to load and reuse is more useful to a small practice than six million items you did not choose.
What if my model has no quantity sets?
It still works. Quantities missing from the model are measured from the geometry, and those rows are labelled as computed so you can see exactly which numbers came from where. If a model has neither authored quantities nor usable geometry for an element, that element is reported with no quantity rather than being dropped from the total.
Can I write costs back into the IFC?
A schema-compliant IfcCostSchedule export is on the roadmap. Be aware this is a one-way capability in practice: support for reading cost schedules back varies by tool — IfcOpenShell-based tools read them, most mainstream authoring and checking applications do not yet — so treat it as a durable openBIM record rather than a guaranteed round-trip into whatever you open next.
Is my rate book private?
Yes. Rate books are saved to your own workspace and are never shared between accounts. On a Team plan they can be shared with your team, which is what makes a studio's rates reusable across everyone's projects.
What happens to my file after processing?
Your file is uploaded over HTTPS and processed on our servers. Guest uploads are stream-only — the working files are deleted as soon as your download finishes. Free accounts keep results for 7 days; Pro keeps them 90 days and Team 180 days. Files are never shared with third parties or used to train AI.