Drake Hub
The platform replacing Buildertrend at a California builder: field, finance and estimating with AI in every module.
The project
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”.
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 was built
Connections & 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.