Where the estimate actually comes from

A renovation quote isn't a number you pull out of thin air. It's the end of a short chain of questions: what materials are we replacing, how much surface is involved, what's the labor rate in your department, what VAT rate applies, is there an eligible subsidy that reduces the final bill? Get any of those wrong and the total drifts by hundreds of euros.

Two jobs, two tools

PlanVue treats an estimate as two problems stapled together, because they are.

The first problem is understanding your project. A photo of a bathroom isn't self-describing, something has to read it, recognise the tiles, the fixtures, the dated wallpaper, and pair that with the free-text description you typed. That's a perception job. It's exactly what modern vision models are built for, and we use one.

The second problem is turning that understanding into a price. This is arithmetic. Quantity × unit price × regional coefficient, add VAT, subtract the subsidy, round the total. A calculator can do this. A language model, left unsupervised, cannot, at least not reliably. If you've ever asked a general-purpose chatbot for a quote and watched it hallucinate a €12,400 total that falls apart the moment you check the line items, you've met this problem first-hand.

Why the split is load-bearing

Keeping the arithmetic out of the model is a trust decision. It means every euro in your final estimate has a traceable origin: a line item with a quantity, a unit price pulled from our regional database, a coefficient keyed to your postal code, a VAT rate matching your project type. If you ask us where a number comes from, we can point to the input.

That's why, when we update our pricing tables or add a department to the regional coefficients, every estimate that touches those rows reflects the change within a deploy. No retraining, no regression testing against a black box, no prompt engineering. The catalog changes, the output changes.

What this means for you

Two practical consequences.

First, the numbers hold up in conversation with an artisan. You can walk into a consultation with a PlanVue estimate and defend any line, "the price per square metre here is based on the regional coefficient for my department", rather than being told you were quoted a fantasy. Artisans appreciate it, because it means they're talking to an informed homeowner rather than someone halfway through negotiation theatre.

Second, when our estimate differs from a professional quote, the gap is diagnosable. Either we under-counted surface, missed a subsidy your household qualifies for, or have stale unit prices for your specific trade. All three are fixable. A black-box number is not.

The honest caveat

A photo-plus-text estimate is never going to beat an on-site visit from a qualified professional. Walls hide problems. A plumber pokes at a joint and spots a leak a camera misses. Our estimate is designed to answer a different question: is this project in the range I think it's in, before I spend an afternoon getting three counter-quotes? For that question, deterministic arithmetic on top of real-world data beats an opaque guess every time.