Thanks so much for your review Ashley!

Glad you like our support too. It makes such a difference being able to go from running into a problem and speaking with someone or jumping on a screen sharing session in minutes.

Something else that really helps here is that the support team is made up of former estimators, so they've lived the problems our customers run into and speak the same language when it comes to describing issues.

Thanks Graeme! Glad you like our support. The team really do put in a huge amount of effort here.

With automatic counting, you can occasionally run into PDFs that haven't been fully designed and don't contain symbols that can be automatically counted, but you're right, we've built manual counting tools into the app (symbol count, linear & area measurements etc) and these provide a good backup option.

Using these manual counting tools has a number of benefits over traditional manual counting too:

- You don’t need to print the drawings out

- You don’t need to count as you work (Countfire keeps track of the count for you)

- You can use zones to split quantities down however you need them (see link below)

- You get a set of marked up record drawings that show what you’ve done

Really appreciate your review Johnny!

I'm glad you mention the accuracy & speed side. That's something we spent a great deal of time getting right initially, and continually tweak and improve it over time.

With the estimation side—we do!

I've linked to a short video below that outlines how estimating works in Countfire.

Thanks so much for your kind words!

The coverage area feature is super helpful when it comes to checking fire alarm schemes / visualising their coverage. It's actually pretty helpful for lighting control PIR coverage too 💪

With importing custom symbols, I know what you mean there. We've actually got a feature request for that open and I'd suggest you add your vote towards that, if you haven't already (link below).

While I can't guarantee we'll build every feature, ones that have a lot of votes do strongly influence what we build (for example, we're currently working on a new drawing overlay / comparison feature as well as better support for sheeted drawings, which has come directly from this feature voting system 🔥)

Thanks Max! We've been at this long enough now for the software to be well battle tested, highly accurate, super fast when you really understand how to drive it.

In terms of spotting missing symbols, I suspect you're aware of this already, but Countfire has a number of in-built accuracy checks and both toggling off counted symbols (shortcut = T) and checking the "symbols removed" output PDFs can really help here.

I've linked to a help centre article that covers these accuracy checks below.

Thanks for your kind review!

Great to hear that your takeoffs are more accurate now. We've spent a lot of time on the accuracy side over the years and the accuracy reports that Countfire produces at the end of every takeoff go a long way to making it easy for people to verify the accuracy of their takeoffs.

In terms of Countfire not picking up symbols of the same type, one thing you can run into is inconsistency with the way symbols have been drawn on PDF drawings, with symbols sometimes differing in subtle ways.

This kind of variation is expected on construction drawings though, and the way to handle it is to make a few more selections to give Countfire more information to work with.

Each time you notice a symbol that's drawn in a slightly different way, you just pick that up as an additional selection and the software then automatically finds all similar symbols across the entire project.

I've included a related help centre article below.

Thanks Dean. Great to hear you're getting value from Countfire!

With symbols, it's one of the inherent problems of the space we're working in, because to a certain extent we're at the mercy of what's been designed on the drawing (and how it's been drawn).

As much as possible though, we have designed Countfire to handle this uniqueness and there's a few approaches available:

1. You can hold the shift key when selecting symbols to pick up 90 degree rotations (link below)

2. You can try editing the selection and simplifying it down to it's core components (meaning your selections will find more matches across the rest of the project)

3. You can make more selections to give Countfire more information to work with (EG: if you have 10 unique Type A selections versus just 1, those 10 versions, and ones like them, will be found across the entire project)

Thanks for your kind review Chad. Really great to hear that it's making a real difference to your business! 📈💪

Regarding cost, I know we're not the cheapest solution on the market, however, the return on investment should be an order of magnitude higher given the unique & automated way we solve the problem of takeoffs and estimates.

Another potentially less obvious aspect related to cost is customer support. We have a team of former estimators who, on average, respond within 2 minutes to support requests and have them resolved within the hour, meaning if you run into problems or have a question, you'll both get a lightning quick response and be speaking to someone who has done estimating before.

This incredibly high level of support is always something we've felt strongly about and somewhere we want to continue to investing in.

Thanks very much for your review! Great that you're saving so much time with Countfire.

With PDFs that are actually flat images, generally this occurs with less than 1% of PDFs, but Countfire also has manual counting tools that provide a solid backup option for taking off these drawings.

These manual counting tools also have a number of benefits over using a traditional manual counting process:

- You don’t need to print the drawings out

- You don’t need to count as you work (Countfire keeps track of the count for you)

- You can use zones to split quantities down however you need them

- You get a set of marked up record drawings that show what you’ve done

The link below has more on this.

Thanks so much for your review and great to hear you like the cloud & easy Excel export aspects.

I hear you regarding archiving projects. That one is definitely high up on our feature request list and something we do plan to add.

With intermitted speed issues, it can be a little tricky sometimes. Countfire itself is pretty fast, robust and well battle tested in this area now, however, because PDFs can contain virtually anything, and often do, occasionally we do encounter PDFs that are tricky to handle (or just contain straight corrupted file information).

It's worth noting that any software that works with construction PDFs needs to jump over the same hurdles and I'd wager given our deep experience in this area over the last 10 years, we handle things better than most.

We're actually also in the midst of upgrading a key aspect of Countfire's infrastructure which should improve things even further 💪

Thanks again for your review!