Built by an estimator, for subbies
Subino wasn’t designed in a boardroom. It came out of years of pricing and delivering trade packages — and the gap between what subcontractors need and what the big platforms sell.
The story
Most construction software is built for the head contractor and then sold down the chain. You end up paying for modules you never open, while the things you actually live in — cost-coded estimates, committed cost, progress claims, forecast margin — are somebody else’s afterthought.
I’m Reza. I price façade, cladding and carpentry packages in Australia. I’ve watched the same numbers get typed out three times: once into the quote, again into a budget tracker, again into a claim. By the end of the job nobody quite trusted any of them, and the one that mattered — what this job is actually going to make — was a guess dressed up in a spreadsheet.
The choice on offer was a spreadsheet held together with hope, or a platform built for the builder above me. Most of us ran both. The software for the job, and an Excel template beside it for the estimating, the claims and the forecast the software didn’t cover. Squaring those two up every week is where the hours went. It is also where the money quietly went missing.
So I built the thing I wanted on my own desk first, and kept building it until it could run a job end to end.
That’s Subino. It starts where your job starts — the estimate — and keeps the same cost-coded backbone all the way through orders, bills, claims and forecasting. Price it once and the whole job runs on that number.
It is 31 tools across 9 areasrather than one clever screen, because a subbie’s week is not one job at one stage. And it is deliberately narrow: built for subcontractors, not sold down to them.
I built it for my own desk first and it has been running my jobs since — 34 of them, 49 quote revisions, $3.6M of work priced through it. That is not a customer list, and I am not going to pretend it is one. It does mean every screen in here has had to survive a real tender week. One of those jobs is on the site, end to end.
How it’s built
Three rules the software actually keeps
One number, all the way down
The price you put on the estimate becomes the budget, the claim line and the labour target — per cost code, with nothing re-typed.
Permissions in the database, not the buttons
The crew, the office and management see what their role allows because the database says so — not because a button was hidden from the screen.
Nothing is saved until you confirm it
Where the software drafts something for you — a follow-up, a bill read off a PDF — it shows you first. You approve it; it doesn't approve itself.
Talk to the person who built it
Book a demo and you won't get a sales script — you'll get someone who has priced the same kind of work you do.
No obligation, no card — thirty minutes on a job of your own.