Juan Saravia ESEN

Work · Construction management · AI

Drake Hub

The platform replacing Buildertrend at a California builder: field, finance and estimating with AI in every module.

Drake Hub, desktop view
Drake Hub, mobile view
“Read the plans and build the estimate”20 modules · one developer
RoleInternal product · Full-stack · AI
Year2026
StatusIn daily use

Overview

Drake Construction was paying for Buildertrend and using only a slice of it. Drake Hub is the platform I built to replace it: schedules, field reports, finances, estimating, a client portal and a bid room — with AI built into every module, something closed software was never going to allow.

The team now uses it daily: a superintendent sends photos from a single link with nothing to install and the AI writes the report, classifies it and files it. And because the AI reads the reports and the schedule together, it catches what a human misses: “punch-out is still running two weeks past its end date” or “there is interior-door work that exists nowhere in the plan”.

Features

What it does.

Schedule analyst

AI cross-checks field reports against the plan and flags which task is slipping — with the fix already proposed and its impact on delivery.

Cost intelligence

336 line items from the company’s past jobs, so estimates use its own numbers — not internet averages.

AI estimating

Reads the full plan set and generates quantified takeoffs by trade, citing the source page.

Frictionless field reports

Photos, text or voice from a single link — no app, no login. AI writes and files them.

Financial hub

Live schedule of values, client-signed change orders and invoices captured by photo.

One product, five audiences

Office, field, client, subcontractors and a Telegram bot for daily work.

How it works

From start to finish.

  1. On site

    Photo, text or a voice note from a link, no app, no login.

    Link · QR

  2. Speech to text

    Notes dictated in Spanish are transcribed instantly.

    Groq Whisper

  3. AI writes and cross-checks

    Claude writes the daily log in English and checks it against the schedule.

    Claude

  4. Filed to the job

    Logs, Gantt, financials, plans and photos in one place.

    Turso · Vercel Blob

  5. Office and client

    Automatic daily report at 3:45 pm and a client portal.

    Resend · Twilio

Screens

How it looks.

Tech specs

How it is built.

Backend

  • Node · Express
  • Turso · libSQL
  • 37 tables
  • 246 endpoints

Frontend

  • Vanilla JS
  • Installable PWA
  • Android TWA
  • Vercel Blob

IA

  • Claude (Sonnet + Opus)
  • Vision over plans
  • Groq Whisper
  • Voice assistant

Integrations

  • Anthropic Claude — estimating, reports, search and assistant
  • Turso · Vercel Blob — database and files (plans, photos, PDFs)
  • Groq Whisper — voice notes dictated from the job site
  • Twilio · Resend — SMS and the automatic 3:45 pm daily report
  • Telegram · Google Calendar — pocket assistant and calendar that suggests tasks

Method

  • Deliberately narrow scope: instead of cloning Buildertrend, I rebuilt only the modules the company actually used and layered AI on top · invitation-only access with seven roles (admin, PM, superintendent, office, field, client, subcontractor) · human-in-the-loop on every bulk change · automatic weekly backups with a tested restore · a custom monitor sampling response times every two minutes · it runs for less than a single monthly license of the software it replaces.