Melt Bid

MeltBid by MeltPlan is an AI bid leveling software built for general contractors in preconstruction. The traditional bid leveling process takes estimators hours of manual work — pulling numbers from PDFs, building spreadsheets by hand, hunting for buried exclusions, and hoping nothing slips through before you award. MeltBid compresses all of that into minutes.

The workflow is straightforward: upload your subcontractor proposals and MeltBid automatically structures them into a leveled comparison inside your own Excel template or a provided one. It works both in the browser and natively inside Excel via MeltPlan's Microsoft marketplace add-in, so estimators don't have to change how they work.

The value, though, goes well beyond speed. MeltBid surfaces five core capabilities:

Bid leveling in minutes. Upload multiple proposals — PDFs from each sub — and get a fully populated line-by-line comparison in your template in under 5 minutes. Bring your own format or start from MeltBid's.

Scope gap detection. Automatically identifies line items that one sub priced and others excluded or missed entirely. These gaps are the silent killers in preconstruction — they show up as change orders in the field, well after you've already awarded the contract.

Exclusions and qualifications flagging. Highlights non-obvious exclusions and qualifications buried deep in bid packages — things like "fire alarm devices excluded," "roof penetrations not included," or "price valid 30 days only, subject to material escalation." The cheapest number on paper becomes the most expensive one post-award when these get missed.

Full traceability. Every number in the leveled output links directly back to the source line in the original proposal. No black box — estimators can click any cell and see exactly which clause in which sub's PDF drove that value, with a "Mark as Reviewed" workflow to systematically work through the output.

Natural-language AI Q&A. Ask plain-English questions directly against your leveled bids: "Who is the lowest bidder and by how much?" "What did Summit exclude?" "Where's the biggest spread across bidders on mechanical?" MeltBid answers in context, scoped to the exact run you're reviewing.

It's built for the way estimators actually work — in the browser or right inside Excel — and is aimed squarely at GCs who are tired of the bid leveling process eating their preconstruction capacity.