Your plans and your prices stay yours.
Sharp Pencil is a takeoff service. We do not bid work. We do not resell your numbers. We do not touch your cost data for anything but your own jobs. This page says exactly what we do and do not do with what you send us, in plain language, so you do not have to take it on faith.
The commitments
How we handle your data, stated plainly
Written for a contractor who has been burned before.
We never bid your work
Sharp Pencil does not bid, hold roofing licenses, or perform roofing work of any kind. We are not a roofing contractor. A plan set you send us will never be used to compete with you, on that job or any other.
Your cost data prices your jobs only
This is the one that actually matters, and it is the hardest line we draw. Your material pricing and labor rates are the most sensitive thing you can hand a stranger in this trade, and unlike the drawings, they are genuinely yours. They price your estimates and nothing else. Never pooled into an average, never used to benchmark anyone, never shown to another customer, never used to improve anything, never sold. If you would rather not share them at all, take the quantity takeoff and price it yourself.
The system does get better at reading drawings
We will say this plainly rather than pretend otherwise. Real plan sets are how the system learns to handle real documents, and yes, the sets that come through make it better at reading the next one. What that does not mean: your cost data is never part of it, nothing identifying you or your company is retained in what improves, and no drawing is ever republished or handed to anyone. What improves is the ability to read a set. Never anything about your business.
Nothing is shared or sold
Not to competitors, not to manufacturers, not to data brokers, not to general contractors, not to anyone. No aggregate reports, no market insights built from your bids, no "anonymized" resale. There is no version of our business where your files become someone else's product.
Delete it whenever you want
Your account holds your jobs, your documents and your price book, and any of it can be gone whenever you say so. No reason required. Automatic deletion of plan sets 90 days after upload is being rolled out. Delivered takeoff packages are kept for your records until you ask us to delete them. Deleting straight from your account is being built now; until that ships, one email removes it, usually the same business day, and you get written confirmation.
This is the contract, not a brochure
Every commitment on this page is written into our terms of service, so it applies to every customer from the free first takeoff onward. If we ever change it, this page changes first.
Why we bother saying it
Because you are right to ask
Why should a roofer trust a takeoff service with a full plan set?
Honestly, cautiously. A plan set plus your cost data is enough for someone to bid against you, and handing that to an outside party is a real risk that deserves a real answer rather than a privacy policy nobody reads. Our answer is structural: we do not do roofing work, so we have nothing to gain from your bid and no way to act on it. The commitments above are in our terms of service.
So the system learns from my plans. Should that bother me?
Here is the honest framing. The drawings in a bid set were produced by the architect and engineer and issued to bidders through a plan room; they are not your intellectual property, and every contractor bidding that job received the same documents. What is genuinely yours is your cost data, your labor rates, and your bidding strategy, and none of that is ever used for anything but your own estimates. The system getting better at reading a roof plan does not tell it, or us, or anyone else, one thing about how you bid.
Who actually sees my files?
The system that produces the takeoff, the people who review and support your job, and the service providers we use to host and process files, under terms that limit how they may use them. Your set is not passed around a subcontractor pool or a shared drive.
What about the jobs I lose? Do you keep the numbers?
Your job records stay in your account so you can go back to them. They are not analyzed across customers, not used to build any kind of bid database, and not visible to anyone else. Whether you won or lost is not information we collect or care about commercially.
Last updated 19 August 2026. If any of this changes, the page changes first and existing customers are told directly, not quietly.