For quantity surveyors & estimators

Measure the drawing, not the picture of it.

Give hYYa your AutoCAD .dwg or .dxf and it measures a full take-off from the drawing’s own geometry, broken out by service using the drawing’s real layers — wall runs, enclosed areas and exact equipment counts, straight into a working Excel sheet.

Only have a PDF? An issued PDF is nearly always plotted in black, and black line-work carries no service — so a PDF gives you whole-drawing totals, measured from the drawing’s real geometry at the scale you set, and the CAD file is what gives you a take-off split by service. hYYa states which of the two you got, on the sheet itself.

Every quantity is a draft to check before tender. hYYa shows the basis for each one and says plainly what it could not measure. On CAD, coordinate fidelity is verified — 581 dimension entities across three real AutoCAD drawings, measured at 0.000 mm. A multi-page PDF is taken off in full, with a per-sheet column; any sheet drawn to a different scale is named and left out rather than measured wrongly.

Try a drawing free

Take-off is built into every plan — no add-on to buy.

Per-layer lengths, from the geometry

Ask for a layer and hYYa sums its real run length off the drawing's own coordinates — not scaled off an image, not estimated by eye. Wall layers collapse parallel faces to a true centreline instead of double-counting the line-work.

Exact block & equipment counts

Counts come from the block definitions, including blocks nested inside other blocks — so a fixture placed through three levels of reference still counts once, correctly.

Curves measured, not shortcut

A curved pipe run reports its true developed length; ellipses are tessellated exactly. Anything hYYa cannot measure — a SPLINE, for instance — is counted and declared on the take-off with a ⚠ Coverage line, never dropped silently.

One click to Excel or CSV

The whole take-off exports as a working spreadsheet, every row carrying its basis — plan-projected, gross, centreline — so a reviewer can see how each quantity was reached. Watermark-free on either paid plan.

Units confirmed, never guessed

A drawing's units come from the file itself. If they are ambiguous, hYYa asks you to confirm millimetres or metres rather than assuming — because mm-versus-m is a 1000× error on every quantity in the take-off.

Share the lens with your team

On either paid plan, a drawings lens can be shared with up to 10 people, so the take-off, its basis and its notes live in one place instead of in someone's local file.

Which drawings it reads

AutoCAD DXF
The full take-off, split by service. Measured directly off the drawing's own layers, and units come from the file, so there is usually no scale to set at all.
AutoCAD .dwg (binary)
The full take-off, split by service — measured directly in hYYa Cloud on the web. The on-device hYYa Vault app reads PDF and DXF only, so save a .dwg as DXF first if you are working offline.
Vector PDF
Whole-drawing totals, after a quick two-click scale — confirm one known printed dimension and the rest follows. Issued PDFs are nearly always plotted in black, and black line-work carries no service, so expect totals rather than a per-service breakdown. A colour-plotted PDF, where each service has its own pen colour, does split.
Scanned or photographed drawings
Not measured, and hYYa will say so. There is no real geometry in a raster image to measure, and guessing off pixels is how a take-off goes quietly wrong.

What it does not do

It does not compare revisions — diffing rev B against rev C is not here yet. It does not price anything; it measures. It does not deduct openings from gross areas, and a named wall layer may include both external and internal walls, so read the basis on each row. And it is an AI draft: check it against the drawing before it goes into a tender. Anything hYYa could not measure is printed on the take-off rather than quietly left out.

Included on every plan

Take-off is not an add-on and never has a separate price — it draws from your plan’s credit allowance like everything else. If drawings are your day job, both paid plans give you the same tools — binary .dwg support, watermark-free Excel, whole-corpus reasoning across a project’s paperwork, and a shared lens for your team. Pick Cloud On-Demand if the work comes in bursts and you would rather buy credits for a job than hold a subscription, or Cloud Ultra if you are measuring most weeks and want an allowance that renews itself.

See plans