Free trade calculators, a help center, and referral credit

Bit & Grain now gives you free trade calculators, a help center, and account credit for referring a contractor. You can run the numbers for your trade right inside the app, look up the answer to a how-do-I question, and earn credit when you send a fellow contractor our way.

Before this, sizing a job meant a separate calculator app, a worn estimating book, or doing the math in your head on the truck. Now there are calculators for ten trades, plus a set that works across all of them. Carpentry has board feet, deck boards, stair stringers, joist spans, and more. Flooring has area, tile, hardwood, and underlayment. Electrical covers wire size, conduit fill, voltage drop, load, and breakers. Plumbing covers pipe sizing, water heater sizing, drainage slope, gas pipe, and fixture units. Roofing, HVAC, painting, landscaping, general contracting, and concrete and masonry each have their own set. The cross-trade tools include a job cost estimator, a material list builder, a unit converter, and a code lookup for common NEC, IRC, and IPC entries. They are free; you sign in with your account and start typing.

Picture standing in a half-framed basement working out a stair run. You open the stair stringer calculator on your phone, punch in the total rise and your run, and get the number of steps and the cut dimensions, with a note on the code clearance. Or you are at the supply house and need to know how many bags of concrete a footing takes; the concrete volume calculator gives you the answer before you reach the register. When you want the why behind a number, the new help center has reference charts, tool guides, and safety tips grouped by trade, so you can read up on a span table or a wire chart without leaving the site.

This release also adds a refer-a-contractor credit. Open Settings, then Referrals, and you get your own share link. Send it to another contractor; when they sign up and subscribe to Pro, you earn account credit that shows up on your next bill. The same page tracks who you have referred and where each one stands, so you always know what you have earned.

You can find the calculators under Tools in the Resources menu on the website, the help center under Help, and your share link under Settings, then Referrals. Here's how to start: open Tools, pick your trade, and run your first calculation; then grab your referral link from Settings and pass it to a contractor you know. It's available on every plan.