See what a bidder will find, while you can still change it.
An independent read of your set at 60 or 90 percent — coordination, completeness, conflicts and whether it can be bid consistently. Not a critique of the design. A second pair of eyes on the documents before anyone is pricing them.
$275 an hour · quarter-hour increments · two-hour minimum
Massachusetts public work — DCAMM, MSBA, municipal and district projects
Eight ways a set gets questioned after it is issued…
The same eight checks a bidder’s estimator will run, run earlier and handed to you instead.
Owner document readiness
Missing sections, an unreissued spec index, an addendum that moved the drawings but not the schedule.
Change-order prediction
Deferred scope, concealed conditions, and the clauses a contractor will read as an invitation.
Biddability
Where the language is too loose to price, every bidder guesses differently — and the spread in the bid tab is not competition, it is confusion.
Claims
The clause that decides a fight is usually written long before anybody is fighting.
Constructability
What is unbuildable as drawn comes back as an RFI, then as a change order.
Schedule
Long-lead items, phasing through an occupied building, and whether the calendar was drawn from the work or from a promise.
Extended general conditions
What a delay costs, so the exposure is known before the owner grants the first time extension.
Financial
What the open risks are worth, always quoted as a range, so they are closed or funded deliberately.
Every set is also read against Massachusetts procurement law — M.G.L. c.149, c.149A and c.30B — and against 244 catalogued red-flag language patterns across 20 risk families. Accessibility is reviewed against ADA / 521 CMR. This is not a proofread.
A finding only reaches your report if it clears all three.
Cited to a page. If we cannot point at it in your documents, it does not ship.
It moves money or time. Interesting is not the bar; expensive is.
Your own back-check would not have caught it. We do not bill you for what you already know.
Everything else is suppressed. We would rather send you four findings you act on than forty you scroll past.
A 60 percent roof set. Fifty-nine findings.
Fifty-nine findings cleared the standard and reached the report. Every finding sorts into one of three categories, severity ranked inside each. There is no score. Project name, owner and dates are removed.
Contract, commercial and administrative
What the front-end documents require, and where they contradict the drawings or the specification.
Document errors with no cost impact
Wrong references, a stale sheet list, an index that no longer matches the book. None of it moves money. All of it is read by someone deciding how careful the set is.
Cost, procurement, schedule and scope
The findings that come back as RFIs, change orders and time extensions if the set is issued as drawn.
At 60 percent, all fifty-nine were still a revision. After award, the forty-eight in Category 3 are a negotiation. Exposure on a set is always reported as a range, never as a single figure. That is one set, not an average.
Three steps, before you issue.
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01
Send us the set
Drawings, specifications and the front end at 60 or 90 percent — however you have them. Drag the folder into the portal. No formatting, no file naming, nothing to learn. Large sets upload in pieces and resume if your connection drops.
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02
We read the whole set with Nemesis™
Every drawing against every specification section, and the front-end documents against both. Nemesis™, our own software, reads the set across all eight checks above — then a person clears every candidate finding against the real / material / non-obvious standard before it reaches you.
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03
You revise, or you do not
A short cited report: what we found, where it is in the documents, and — finding by finding — whether to revise the drawing, tighten the specification, or leave it as it stands. It goes to you, not to the owner, unless you say otherwise.
Hourly, not a fixed fee per set.
Design-stage review is hourly because the effort tracks the set rather than the project. A set still in design changes while we are reading it, and you should pay for the hours it took and no more.
| General consulting | $275 / hour |
| Claims, schedule or cost-impact analysis | $325 / hour |
| Expedited, under 48 hours | $375 / hour |
| Deposition or expert testimony | $450 / hour |
Design-stage QA/QC review is billed at the general rate. Billed in quarter-hour increments. Two-hour minimum per engagement.
You create an account once and it stays. Nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel. Once a set is issued and out to bid, the fixed-fee audit applies instead — $495 or $995 a set, on the owner and OPM and contractor pages. That is a different product with a different price.
Where our work stops, and where your documents stay.
What we are not
Pythagoras provides construction document analysis and risk identification. We do not provide legal advice, and we are not the engineer or architect of record for any project. Accessibility findings are reported against ADA / 521 CMR; design decisions remain with the licensed professional who made them.
Your documents stay here
Sets are read on our own machines, on our own network. Nothing is uploaded to a third-party service and nothing is processed on an outside vendor’s system. Confidential pricing, unreleased design documents and pre-bid strategy do not leave our custody at any point in the engagement.
The cheapest time to fix it is now.
Send us the 60 or 90 percent set through the Pythagoras Construction Analytics portal and we will tell you what is in it. Nothing to install, no password to keep — you sign in with a one-time code sent to your work email.