Sharp Pencil is a takeoff service and nothing else. 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
Written for a contractor who has been burned before.
Sharp Pencil does not bid, hold roofing licenses, or perform roofing work of any kind. We are not a contractor and we will not become one. A plan set you send us will never be used to compete with you, on that job or any other. If you ever find otherwise, that is a breach of this agreement and you are owed a refund of everything you have paid us.
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.
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.
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.
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, no retention call, no support runaround. Plan sets also delete themselves automatically 90 days after upload. Deleting straight from your account is being built now; until that ships, one email removes it the same day and you get written confirmation.
You should not have to send us an NDA to get a promise in writing, and we should not be able to quietly change the deal later. Every commitment on this page is written into our terms of service, so it binds us for every customer automatically, from the free first takeoff onward. Nothing to negotiate, nothing to countersign, and no version of this where a big contractor gets stronger protection than a small one.
Why we bother saying it
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 not aspirational. They are what we will put in writing.
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.
The system that produces the takeoff, and the roofing professional who reviews the job before it goes back to you. Nobody else. There is no offshore team passing your set around, no subcontractor pool, no shared drive.
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.
Our customer is the roofing contractor. If that ever changes, it will be announced here first, and any customer who is not comfortable with it can have their data deleted before it takes effect.
Usually there is no need, and here is the honest reason why. Signing a different confidentiality agreement with every customer means dozens of documents that contradict each other, and the protection you get ends up depending on how good your legal team is rather than on how we actually behave. So we did it the other way: these commitments live in our terms of service, binding on us for every customer from the first free takeoff. You get the same protection as the largest shop we work with, without sending a single document. If your company genuinely cannot proceed without its own paper, tell us and we will talk — but read the terms first, because they may already say more than your NDA does.
Last updated 19 August 2026. If any of this changes, the page changes first and existing customers are told directly, not quietly.