BidCraft Tile
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2026-08-12

Search that finds things, and materials that say why they're there

"thinset" used to return nothing. Materials now get picked out of your own catalog and sized to the job, every one of them says how it got there, and one tap makes a correction stick.

Search that finds things, and materials that say why they're there

Three things changed this week, and they're really one thing: BidCraft got a lot better at picking the materials for a job out of the catalog you already have.

Search understands what you typed

Here's a search that used to return zero results: thinset.

Not a typo, not an unusual product — the single most common word in tile installation, matched against a catalog with hundreds of them. It found nothing, because search was looking for the letters "thinset" inside a product's name, and manufacturers don't put the word "thinset" in the name of a thinset.

It returns 16 now. So does caulk (was 0). So does backer (was 0, now 85).

Word order stopped mattering too. honed 2x2, 2x2 honed and honed, 2x2 all bring back the same honed 2×2 mosaics — search matches each word separately instead of hunting for the whole phrase in that exact order with that exact punctuation. honed, 2x2 used to be especially cruel: zero results, while you could see products named exactly that on the screen behind the search box.

And searching your own materials genuinely works now. It used to only look at names you'd typed in yourself — which meant anything you'd saved straight from the catalog was invisible to it. On most accounts that was 97% of the library.

Materials get picked, not guessed

When BidCraft builds the materials list for a proposal, it now works down a ladder and stops at the first rung that answers: the product saved on the service → your favorite for that role → your go-to for that category → the best fit from your catalog.

And "fit" means fit. Everything on that ladder gets checked against what the job actually needs — right unit, big enough, enough coverage — including your own saved picks. A 24-inch linear drain doesn't go into a 32-inch opening just because you saved it once. It gets passed over and something that reaches gets used instead.

Once things fit, the ranking is: fewest pieces that cover the job, without buying a silly amount extra, cheapest as the tie-break. That's the difference between one 150 sqft roll for a 120 sqft floor and sixteen little sample pieces — which technically wastes less and would be an embarrassing thing to unload from a truck.

Every material says how it got there

There's a short line under each one now:

  • 🔖 "Your go-to for Waterproofing" — you picked this, so if it's wrong, the thing to change is your preference.
  • ✦ "Best fit for Underlayment — 1 × 150 sqft covers the 120 needed" — nothing was saved for this slot, so BidCraft worked it out. There's the arithmetic.
  • ✦ "Found in your catalog by Biddy" — Biddy went looking, and this came back.

Knowing which of those you're looking at is the whole point. It's the difference between "I need to fix my settings" and "I need to fix this row."

And the same for "Generate with AI"

The Generate with AI button on a service's materials — and on a project template's lines — was working off an older, dumber version of all this. It now uses the same catalog ladder, so it can reach anything filed under the right type instead of only the handful of product lines it had memorised. If you've loaded your own supplier's price list, that's where it shows: a wall tile row comes back with an actual field tile off your list, where before it came back empty.

It also stopped handing you picks that were never going to work. A product sold by the roll can't fill a row you count by the piece, and one of those would have been quietly dropped later anyway when the proposal got built — so there's no point putting it in front of you to verify. Those rows now get a product that actually fits, or nothing.

Nothing is the right answer sometimes. Tile leveling clips and silicone caulk genuinely aren't in the catalogs yet, so those rows come back blank and wait for you, rather than showing you a trowel with a straight face. A blank row is a job you can see; a wrong one is a job you have to notice first.

Fix it once

Tap a material to edit it, change the item code to what you actually use, and there's a checkbox waiting — "Use this from now on" — already ticked. Leave it, and that product becomes your go-to for its category. Next proposal starts from the right answer.

It only appears when you actually swap the product, so fixing a quantity can't quietly retrain anything behind your back. And untick it any time it's genuinely a one-off.

More detail: Materials lists explained and Finding products in the catalogs.