The story

I spent ten years pricing buildings before anyone drew them.

Then I looked at how houses get costed and found the discipline was not there. arko exists to move it across.

Kritika Golchha

Ten years plus of experience in designing, pricing, and delivering whole envelopes and façades in commercial construction.

Architectural technologist. MSc Sustainable Architecture. Based in Edinburgh.

With major contractors, on projects where that package is the largest single line in the budget.

Much of that on the estimating side. Building bids, pricing variations, and working out what the same design costs when it is built three different ways in three different products. That is what arko does, pointed at houses instead of offices.

I also grew up in a family steel business, where nobody drew anything without knowing what it cost to make.

arko runs on that network. The firms that price the work, the people who build it, and ten years of knowing which number to question before it reaches a client.

The same discipline, on a house.

From £1,800. Four questions to start. We come back within two days.

Get a cost plan →

What I found

Residential does it backwards, and everyone knows.

ConceptDesignTenderBuild

Commercial

The supplier is in the room before the first drawing is issued. Everything after is designed to a number that already exists.

Residential

A rate per square metre, then nothing real until tender. By then the drawings are finished, the fees are spent, and the only lever left is to take things out.

Cost unknown Cost known

“The biggest problem is architects make these drawings, and then we tell the client it’s totally unaffordable.”

A structural panel manufacturer, Homebuilding & Renovating Show, Edinburgh, October 2026

That is not the architect’s failure.

Nobody gave them a number to draw against. The supplier holds the price, the architect holds the drawing, and until tender the two never meet.

arko is the bridge between them. The room that never existed before.

What this means for architects → What this means for suppliers →

That method, pointed at your project.

Two weeks from the drawings you already have.

Get a cost plan →

So we went and checked

The whole idea rests on one question.

Would a supplier price a specification months before an order? We put that to eleven of them in a single day at the Homebuilding & Renovating Show in Edinburgh.

11 of 11

said they would price a specification at design stage. Not one refused.

30 days to 12 months

the range of how long they said they would hold that price.

Every one

described the same failure. By tender, the decision has already been made.

The information exists and the suppliers will give it. It just never reaches the person paying, at the only moment it would be useful.

Those eleven are where the list started. Every plan since is priced against named firms who have already said they will quote at design stage, and a record of how long each of them holds a figure.

Where we actually are

Early, and saying so.

arko is early, and I would rather say so than imply otherwise.

What is not built yet

No platform. The tools architects and suppliers will work in are the next thing, and they come when the method is proven rather than before.

What already exists

Ten years of pricing envelopes commercially. A supplier network that will put a figure to a drawing rather than an order, a record of who prices what and for how long, and a method run against real buildings for a decade on the commercial side.