Track3D has stopped charging for jobsite photos. The Milpitas, Calif., startup said Oct. 20 that contractors now pay only for construction progress tracking, at $0.15 per square foot per project, and get visual documentation included for up to five times the contracted tracking area. It’s a bet that 360-degree captures have turned into a commodity and that the money is in what software can count from them.
The workflow is simple on paper. Crews capture the site at the end of the shift, and Track3D returns quantified progress by level, trade and area in as little as six hours, checked against the schedule, according to the company’s pricing announcement. Visual captures come back in as little as 30 minutes. The system works from standard 2D drawings and uses a BIM model only when one exists.
Why progress tracking pricing is the real announcement
Reality capture vendors have mostly sold storage and viewing. Track3D is flipping that. Co-founder and CEO Chaitanya NK said contractors have been “paying for the pictures” and then paying their own staff to work out what the pictures show. Giving away the photos is his way of saying the photos were never the product.
Square-foot pricing also makes the cost easy to compare with a project engineer’s time. On a 400,000-square-foot building, list price works out to $60,000 for the project. Whether that’s cheap depends on how many hours a GC burns on floor walks today and how accurate the automated counts turn out to be.
The Hensel Phelps case study behind the claim
The evidence offered is one job. On a six-story office and operations center that Hensel Phelps built between two active terminals at San Francisco International Airport, Track3D’s own case study credits the platform with 2,964 hours saved and $342,000 in labor savings. Area superintendent Garin Anderson is quoted saying progress verification fell from 20 hours a week to one. Track3D also says 16 of ENR’s Top 30 contractors use it.
Those figures come from a vendor case study, not an independent audit. The tool went in during the project’s second phase, so there’s no clean before-and-after on the same scope. Hensel Phelps innovation director Thai Nguyen didn’t put his own number on it. He said the interesting question is “what that data can actually tell you.”
Where AI progress tracking still has to prove itself
The pitch lands in a crowded month. Procore used Groundbreak to push AI agents that bulk-update submittals, and EarthCam wired its jobsite camera AI into ChatGPT and Claude. Everyone is selling interpretation now. The hard part is accuracy on messy interiors, where rough-in disappears behind the next trade and staged material looks a lot like installed material.
The case study says the SFO team added lighting fixtures to the tracked scope midway through the job once it spotted the gap, which suggests new object types can be added quickly. It doesn’t say how often the counts were wrong, and that’s the number a superintendent would want before trusting a pay app to it.
The SFO savings claim, 2,964 hours, is about 1.4 years of one person’s full-time work. If that holds on ordinary jobs, 15 cents a foot is easy to justify. If it doesn’t, free photos won’t save the deal.