You need to find subs
A real subcontractor network and two-sided bid board mean you can broadcast an ITB and get coverage. Trueleveler levels the bids you already have — it does not source them.
COMPARISON · TRUELEVELER vs DOWNTOBID
Trueleveler vs DownToBid: source the bids, or level them?
They sound like rivals, but they do different jobs. DownToBid reads your plans, finds subs, and sends ITBs — it’s bid solicitation. Trueleveler takes the quotes that come back and produces a true-cost, apples-to-apples comparison — then runs the job to closeout. Here’s which one you actually need (often, it’s both).
Level
Not just solicit
40-90s
Per-bid analysis
$99–1,099
Flat /mo · public
28
Lifecycle engines
§ 01SIDE BY SIDE · AS OF JULY 2026
Two stages of the same job.
DownToBid lives before the bids land — sourcing subs and chasing coverage. Trueleveler lives the moment quotes arrive — normalizing scope, adding back exclusions, and carrying the winner through to pay apps and closeout. They overlap less than the names suggest. What “through to closeout” actually means — award, purchase orders, change orders, vendor compliance, procurement and budget commitments — is spelled out in § 02.
| DownToBid | Trueleveler | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Bid solicitation — reads plans, finds subs, sends ITBs, runs a sub-side bid board. | Bid leveling — normalizes the quotes you receive into one true-cost comparison, then runs the project. Sourcing the quotes is covered too — RFQ Generator turns a scope into a vendor-ready RFQ and emails it to your vendor list directly, without a separate solicitation product. |
| AI bid leveling | Plan analysis and ITB matching; third-party reviewers note it does not do true side-by-side leveling. | Core engine: normalizes inclusions, exclusions, retainage & payment terms across up to 10 quotes in 40-90 seconds. It also flags per-line price outliers and mobilization front-loading automatically, and rolls the results into a per-vendor reliability score — pricing and lead-time performance from every bid, plus completion rate, time-to-close and reopen rate from Punch List — that carries across projects. |
| Subcontractor network | Yes — sub database + two-sided bid board is the product’s flywheel. | No shared sub network yet — but your own Vendor Database plus free tracked ITB links let you invite your subs to bid, see who viewed, and nudge who hasn’t. Email bid intake is live — a sub can just reply with a quote and it's ingested automatically; connectors on the roadmap. |
| Post-award lifecycle | No — stops once bids are in. | 28 engines: contract review, CO review, pay-app review, RFI drafter, notices, daily-log synth & more — plus field progress painted on the drawings, flowing straight into schedule % and G703 pay-app lines. |
| Finance / ledger | No. | Native double-entry ledger — WIP tie-out, pay-app revenue, retainage; exports to QuickBooks live, Sage via CSV today (live connector on the roadmap). |
| Pricing | Public: GCs ~$149–500/mo; subs ~$119–299/mo.1 | Public & flat: $99–1,099/mo. No card to try. |
| Onboarding | Self-serve, public pricing. | Self-serve. Drop a PDF, get an analysis — no call, no implementation fee. |
| Best for | GCs who need to find subs and broadcast invitations to bid. | Commercial SMB GCs, subs & owner’s reps who need to level the bids and run the job that follows. |
1 DownToBid publishes pricing; figures checked July 2026 and may change. This is an independent comparison; DownToBid is a trademark of its respective owner.
§ 02POST-AWARD · WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU PICK A WINNER
The half of the job that starts at the award.
A fairness note first: DownToBid is a bidding-stage product — reading plans, finding subs, sending ITBs and running a bid board. It does not position itself for post-award work, so the table below is deliberately not scored against it. This is simply what happens on our side once the winner is picked, so you can judge it against whatever you use for the rest of the job.
Trueleveler runs post-award in two distinct layers, and it matters which is which. AI analysis — an engine reads a document and returns a judgement. Transactional workflow — a record with real states that a person moves, where the money actually changes. The seam between them is the point: the AI verdict lands in a register where a human approves it and the budget lifts.
| Post-award | Layer | What Trueleveler actually does |
|---|---|---|
| Awarding the winning quote | Workflow | One click on the winning quote. It becomes a live procurement commitment at PO stage, and every line item from that quote is stamped as awarded in your price history — separating what actually won from what was merely quoted, which is what the market benchmark and Bid vs Actual read. Restricted to users with procurement permission. |
| Purchase orders | Workflow | Issued in the platform: auto-numbered per project, line items with GL codes, plus tax and payment terms — saved as a draft or issued with a branded PDF. Draft → Issued → Delivered → Invoiced → Paid → Closed, and every status change is written to an append-only, timestamped per-PO audit log. |
| Change order tracking | Analysis + workflow | Change Order Review reads the CO against the original contract and returns a verdict, a recommended amount, manipulation flags and clause references — that part is analysis. The CO then lands in a register at Submitted, where you approve or reject it: approving prompts you to map it to a budget line — you can code it later — rolls the value into the current contract value, and re-runs schedule risk when the CO carries days. A signed T&M ticket can be pushed straight into a CO, pre-filled. |
| Invoice & quote verification | Analysis, not workflow | Three engines — PO vs Quote, PO vs Invoice, Quote vs Invoice — surface unit-price walk-ups, quantity mismatches, unauthorized line items, changed terms and freight that never appeared on the PO, and close with a suggested redline, a payment recommendation or a dispute-ready summary depending on the pair. They compare documents; they do not issue or route anything. |
| Vendor compliance — COIs, bonds, prequal | Analysis + workflow | Drop the certificate PDF and the coverage fields extract themselves — GL, auto, workers’ comp, umbrella, professional, pollution — including CG 20 10 additional insured, CG 20 37 completed operations and CG 24 04 waiver of subrogation. The tracker flags expiring and lapsed certificates in-app against a per-record alert window. Bonds carry surety, A.M. Best rating, amount and expiry. Prequalification scores insurance, bonding, safety EMR and licensing from records already on file, then a reviewer sets approved, conditional or rejected. |
| Procurement & payment approval | Workflow | Every committed item runs seven stages — bid, PO, submittal, fabrication, shipped, on site, installed — with delivery receipts recorded against the ordered quantity. Turn on payment approval and set your own threshold: above it, a payment cannot be marked paid until a different teammate holding the approve-payments permission signs off. Requester, approver, timestamps and any rejection reason stay on the record. |
| Lien waivers & retainage | Workflow | Requested → received → verified → rejected, each waiver tied to the pay app or PO it covers, with notary detail, through-date and exceptions. The server refuses to release held retainage to a subcontractor while any of their waivers is still unverified — overriding it takes a written reason, stored with the user and the timestamp. |
| Budget commitments | Workflow | A cost-coded budget where every line carries Budget, Committed, Actual, Forecast (EAC) and Variance. Approved T&M tickets carry a cost code and roll onto the matching line — refresh on demand, or let the nightly job do it. Purchase orders carry a cost code per line, and PO commitments roll onto the matching budget line — refresh on demand, or let the nightly job do it. |
And what we do not do. We register contracts — prime, subcontract, PO master and amendment, with retainage, payment days, LD rate and cap and governing law — but we do not generate the subcontract document from a winning bid, and we do not send anything for signature; “Out for Signature” is a status you set by hand. The award is a single permissioned action, not a multi-step approval chain with its own history. The budget does carry a buyout ledger — bought-out percentage, savings on committed scopes, and what is still to buy — but it groups by cost code, not by scope package. If those matter to you, they are gaps today.
§ 03CREDIT WHERE DUE · WHERE DOWNTOBID FITS BEST
When DownToBid is the right call.
Solicitation is your bottleneck
If chasing coverage and sending invitations is where your day goes, DownToBid’s plan-reading and ITB automation target exactly that step.
You’re a sub watching the board
Their sub-side bid board surfaces opportunities to bid. That demand-side flywheel is something a leveling tool simply doesn’t have.
Free templates & a strong content library
DownToBid built a deep library of bidding templates and guides. It’s a genuinely useful resource even before you pay.
§ 04WHERE TRUELEVELER FITS BEST
When Trueleveler is the better fit.
Leveling that’s actually leveling
Reading plans and matching subs isn’t comparing quotes. Trueleveler normalizes scope, exclusions, retainage and terms into one true-cost view — with missing scope added back — in 40-90 seconds.
The job doesn’t end at award
Solicitation tools stop when bids land. Trueleveler carries the winner into contract review, COs, pay apps, notices and closeout — 28 engines, one arc.
A native ledger
WIP tie-out, pay-app revenue and retainage live in a built-in double-entry ledger that exports clean to QuickBooks live, Sage via CSV today. No solicitation tool touches your books.
Lower, flatter price
$99–1,099/mo flat, public, no card — below a single GC seat on most network tools, and it doesn’t scale against you.
THEY’RE COMPLEMENTS, NOT RIVALS
Source with a network. Level with Trueleveler.
Use DownToBid (or any network) to find subs and collect quotes. The moment those quotes land — forward them in and let Trueleveler produce the true-cost comparison, then run the contract, COs, pay apps and closeout. Bring three real quotes and see it on your own bids.
Level Your Bids Free →§ 05DON’T TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT
Ask an AI to compare them.
Researching with ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity? These links force a live re-read of our pages instead of stale training data — open one, then come back and run your own bids.
START FREE · NO CREDIT CARD
Got the bids? Level them free.
Drop up to 10 vendor quotes and get a true-cost comparison in 40-90 seconds. No demo, no implementation, no lock-in.