Most estimating tools own one slice of the job. A takeoff app measures. A spreadsheet prices. A separate system handles buyout. The estimator becomes the integration layer — re-keying the same project three times, reconciling numbers that should have been one number all along.
Badger Construction took a different route: they put the Boon Agent to work as a member of the team — effectively a full-time estimator and preconstruction employee that never clocks out. In roughly five weeks, a ten-person team used it to stand up their entire estimating operation on Boon — on-screen takeoff, a reusable assembly library with live pricing formulas, and full cost estimation — starting with none of it in place.
The big picture
Badger didn’t adopt Boon as a faster takeoff tool. They hired the Boon Agent as an estimating and preconstruction teammate — one that runs takeoff, builds and prices assemblies, assembles full cost estimates, and is being pointed next at the precon admin work that usually eats a junior estimator’s week. Everything in their workspace today was built from zero:
- 17 structural takeoffs across 286 plan pages, spanning 6 projects.
- A reusable foundation-assembly library — Slab on Grade, Grade Beam, Monolithic Footer, Spread Footing, Linear Footer, Stemwall — driven by 38 pricing formulas, built once and applied to every job.
- 25 cost estimates totaling 2,162 priced line items.
The before: a workflow trapped behind tooling
Vincent Raffaele had already built out a full specification and item-group structure in Badger’s prior estimating system. The estimating logic wasn’t the problem — the tooling around it was. He wanted the same power without the friction, and a platform he could grow into rather than fight.
The baseline that matters: before Boon, none of Badger’s takeoffs, assemblies, or cost estimates existed in a modern, connected platform. Every measurement, every assembly formula, every priced line item produced on Boon since is net-new capability the team didn’t have before.
The Boon way: build the library once, run it everywhere
Two things moved the needle. First, Vince used the Boon Agent to build the asset he cares about most — a clean, reusable foundation-assembly library it can drive across every foundation job instead of re-measuring and re-pricing by hand each time. In practice the Agent does the work a full-time estimator would: reading the drawings, running the takeoff, building the priced assemblies, and standing up the estimate. Second, when he hit real blockers in a young product — item groups that wouldn’t save, volume measurements that didn’t flow into assemblies, a formula-edit bug that broke required-item links — Boon’s team cleared them fast rather than parking them on a someday-roadmap.
That responsiveness is the quiet engine behind the numbers: 98% of the issues Vince raised were resolved, and more than 75% of his requested improvements were delivered inside the same window.
The ROI: net-new capacity, and a platform that keeps its promises
Because Badger started from nothing in Boon, the return is the capability itself:
- Zero to a complete estimating stack — takeoff, a reusable priced-assembly library, and full cost estimation living in one platform instead of a patchwork of tools, run by an Agent that behaves like a full-time estimator.
- Hours to minutes per foundation job — with the priced-assembly library built, Badger applies it instead of rebuilding takeoffs and re-pricing line by line on every bid.
- A preconstruction employee, not just a tool — the Boon Agent takes on the reading, measuring, pricing, and admin that would otherwise need another estimator on payroll, and it scales with the bid pipeline instead of the headcount budget.
- A path to buyout automation no standalone takeoff tool offers — the finished estimate becomes the input to automated purchase-order generation.
Where it’s going
The foundation is built; the next phase is handing the Agent more of the desk. Badger’s roadmap extends the Boon Agent past takeoff into a full preconstruction employee — one that learns their workflows from screen recordings, manages regional vendor pricing in bulk, and runs the blueprint-to-buyout loop that turns a finished estimate into purchase orders without re-keying. Badger is proving what it looks like when a contractor puts an AI estimator and precon employee on the team and lets it run the whole operation on one platform.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Sean Kim and Arjun Saharan for partnering with Badger Construction through onboarding, and to Vincent Raffaele for his time and candor.
