At an early project meeting, a familiar question comes up: what did the last one cost? Someone remembers the figure. Someone else remembers that it excluded a major package. The spreadsheet is available, but the explanation is in a different file, or with a colleague who has since moved on. Before the team can make a new decision, it has to reconstruct an old one.
We founded Aestor to make that knowledge usable. Our aim is to bring clarity to estimating through transparent, citation-driven AI that keeps costs connected to their evidence and assumptions. A useful estimate should help a team explain its judgment, examine uncertainty, and decide what needs further investigation.
Start with your own projects
The best place to begin looking for relevant comparisons is often your own portfolio. Those projects reflect your specifications, procurement choices, delivery standards, and experience of particular markets. A headline cost from elsewhere can be informative, but it becomes a useful comparable only when you understand what was bought, when it was bought, and under what conditions.
Two buildings can share a use and a floor area while having very different cost drivers. One may include specialist equipment; another may have been procured before a sharp change in labor availability. Even within your own portfolio, similarity needs to be established. The value lies in being able to inspect those differences, adjust for them, and explain why a comparison belongs in the estimate.
That is the work Aestor is designed to support: bringing project records, source documents, and reviewed assumptions into a consistent cost record. Your team's experience becomes easier to find and evaluate when the reasoning remains attached to the numbers.
Your commercial knowledge belongs to you
A portfolio represents years of paid work, negotiation, and delivery. That commercial knowledge belongs to the client. Making it useful should not require giving raw project data to a shared database. Aestor provides a secure, permissioned workspace where membership and roles govern access to workspace records, so teams can work with their own evidence under their organization's control.
There is also value in understanding how your experience compares with the broader market. Our optional market pool supports that perspective through anonymized, coarsened aggregate metrics. Contribution is disabled by default and requires an owner or administrator to opt in. Eligible project metrics are rounded and grouped; shared results exclude names, addresses, documents, notes, and individual cost lines.
Shared comparisons become available only when enough projects from enough independent workspaces contribute. You can use that broader view to question an outlier or understand where your portfolio sits in the market. Participation remains a separate choice. Importing a file does not itself contribute it to the pool.
Keep evidence with its source
Document context matters as much as project context. A price in a bid may depend on an exclusion several pages away. A specification can change what an apparently comparable rate actually covers. An answer that loses those relationships can sound plausible while giving the team the wrong basis for a decision.
Confidence comes from being able to inspect the basis of an estimate. A team should be able to trace a quantity or rate to its source, see the assumptions around it, and understand why a comparable was selected. If the evidence is incomplete or two records disagree, that uncertainty belongs in the discussion.
That is the standard we are building around: useful answers whose evidence remains available to the people responsible for the decision. Transparency gives a team a way to challenge an assumption before it becomes part of a budget.
Build on reviewed experience
As completed projects accumulate, the body of evidence available to the next estimate becomes richer. Reviewed costs, documented adjustments, and resolved questions give teams more useful comparisons. A decision made today can become a well-documented reference for the next project, even when the people involved have moved on.
That is why Aestor exists: to help teams carry what they have learned into the next decision, with the sources and qualifications still visible. Better estimates begin with understanding what you already know, and being clear about what you still need to find out.