Document Crunch
Construction-specific AI that reads contracts, specs and project documents, surfaces the risk buried in them and answers questions with the exact clause and page cited. Sold through negotiated order forms, with a 14-day free trial.
What is Document Crunch?
Document Crunch is a risk intelligence platform for the construction industry, built by a company of the same name founded in Alpharetta, Georgia in 2019 and acquired by Trimble in 2026. Its premise is stated bluntly on the homepage: disputes are not a cost of construction, they are a cost of unmanaged risk, and that risk is sitting in documents nobody has time to read end to end.
The product has two halves. CrunchAI is the reading engine. It is built on construction expertise rather than general language modelling, and the vendor stresses three consequences of that. It reads the whole document in sequence rather than sampling or summarising. It understands structure, so a table, a markup or a cross-reference can legitimately change what a clause means. And it reads across documents, because the exposure usually lives between them: the specification contradicting the contract, the addendum that moved the liquidated damages, the flow-down that shifted liability downstream. Before answering, it tests each finding against the source, looking for both supporting and contradicting evidence, and every answer arrives cited to a page number and a highlighted clause. Under the hood it benchmarks available models and routes each task to whichever fits best, with retrieval-augmented generation over the project documents plus a construction corpus of standard form contracts, industry practice and proprietary legal benchmarks.
Project Assist is the agentic layer that turns reading into work: reviews in a few clicks, answers pulled from across the project, and submittals, notices and RFIs prepared for review. Around both sits the platform proper, where company standards are codified into playbooks, risk is routed to the right person, and decisions are tracked through every project phase.
Coverage runs from pursuit through preconstruction to execution, over prime contracts and subcontracts, scopes of work, NDAs, purchase orders, insurance policies and specifications. The vendor claims deployment on more than 10,000 projects and cites named customers including Balfour Beatty and E-J Electric. It is careful to say the tool supports legal judgement rather than replacing it, and that no final decision is made by the AI.
What it does
- Surface contractual risk across an entire project before anyone signs
- Answer a question about an obligation and cite the exact clause and page
- Compare two contract versions and summarise what changed between them
- Catch contradictions between the contract, the specification and the addenda
- Generate project artefacts such as notices, submittals and RFIs
- Run codified playbooks so every project gets the same review rigour
- Assign risk to an owner and track what is open, overdue or done
When to use Document Crunch / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Document Crunch is the right fit.
When to use Document Crunch
- General and specialty contractors handling a heavy flow of contracts, subcontracts and flow-down clauses
- Preconstruction teams and estimators who must comb through specifications and division checklists before bid day
- Project managers and project controls staff tracking obligations, notices and deadlines from award to closeout
- Contract managers and in-house counsel at companies with no legal department deep enough to review every project
- Owners, insurers, brokers and underwriters exposed to construction contract risk on the projects they back
When not to use Document Crunch
- Any business outside construction: the engine and the reference material are sector-specific and carry no value elsewhere
- Sole traders and very small firms, since access runs through a negotiated order form rather than self-service signup
- Teams wanting general-purpose contract review, a need the vendor itself concedes ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot already cover
- Organisations that must contractually pin down a hosting country or region, which this vendor does not publish anywhere
- Engineering teams that need an API to industrialise document review, as no API documentation is published
How to use Document Crunch
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Book a demo through the website form, or start the 14-day free trial advertised on the trial page
- Take the tailored walkthrough with an account executive, which the vendor keeps to around thirty minutes
- Agree an order form, which sets the number of authorised users, the scope of use and the fees
- Receive a named account, since each authorised user gets a unique login and sharing credentials breaches the licence
- Ask the IT team to wire up single sign-on if that matters to your organisation
- Upload the project documents: contract, subcontracts, specifications, addenda, purchase orders, insurance policies
- Ask questions in plain language and read each answer against the clause and page it cites
- Codify your reviewers' standards into playbooks so every project receives the same treatment
- Generate the artefacts you need, such as notices, submittals and RFIs, then route the risk to an owner
- Add the Microsoft Word add-in or the Procore integration to work where your team already works
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuine sector specialisation: the engine works from construction contracts and benchmarks, not generic text
- Systematic traceability, with each answer tied to a page and a highlighted clause the reader can check
- Explicit verification step that hunts for contradicting evidence before an answer is returned
- SOC 2 Type II attestation from an independent auditor, with the report offered through a trust centre
- Security documented in unusual detail: annual third-party pentests, IPSec VPN access, AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2 or higher, AWS KMS with HSM-held keys
- Clear customer ownership of uploaded documents and generated reports, plus a published amendment for withdrawing the data-exploitation licence
- Real integrations with tools crews already use, namely Procore, Microsoft Word and Trimble ProjectSight
Cons
- No public pricing at all, so budgeting or comparing means going through a salesperson first
- No hosting country or region is published, even though AWS is named as the underlying infrastructure
- By default the customer agreement lets the vendor and its partners derive and exploit Algorithm Data and Trend Data from your documents
- Single-sector product with no value outside construction and the trades around it
- No API documentation and no developer pages, so industrialising the review is out of reach
- No named subprocessor list and no DPA published on the site
- No mobile app on either store and no declared interface language beyond English
Pricing & Plans
No pricing is published anywhere on the site, and no pricing page exists in its sitemap. Access is sold through a signed order form that sets out fees, the number of authorised users and any special terms, with payment due on receipt of invoice, exclusively in United States dollars and stated as non-refundable. Late amounts accrue interest at 1.5% per month or the legal maximum, whichever is lower. A 14-day free trial is advertised, and beta services are occasionally offered at no charge outside the contractual scope. Whether a permanent free plan exists is not stated either way.
- 14-day free trial
- advertised as a self-directed way to explore the platform
- Order form subscription
- priced privately and sized to the number of authorised users and the agreed scope of use
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Document Crunch handles your data.
GDPR overview
The site never writes the words GDPR compliant, yet the machinery is unusually complete for a US vendor. The privacy notice, dated 4 March 2026, sets out lawful bases, walks through each data subject right one by one, states response times of ten business days for acknowledgement and one month for the substantive answer, and points readers to their supervisory authority. VeraSafe is named as Article 27 representative for the European Union, through VeraSafe Ireland Ltd in Cork, with sister entities in Amsterdam and Prague, and again as UK representative. Transfers rely on adequacy decisions, the Data Privacy Framework, binding corporate rules or standard contractual clauses. Privacy requests go to privacy@documentcrunch.com. No data protection officer is named and no DPA is published on the site.
Who owns the data?
The customer agreement is explicit on ownership: the customer keeps all right, title and interest, intellectual property included, in the Customer Data uploaded to the platform and in the Reports the platform generates from it. Document Crunch keeps ownership only of the platform itself and of what it calls Document Crunch Data, meaning service data, Usage Data, Algorithm Data and Trend Data, all of which expressly exclude Customer Data and Reports. On personal data flowing through the platform, the vendor acts as processor on customer instructions, so the customer's own privacy notice governs, not the vendor's. The CrunchAI page sums it up as access, retention and deletion being the customer's call.
Reuse rights
Ownership and licensing are two different questions here, and the second one deserves a careful reading. Section 4.2 of the customer agreement grants Document Crunch a licence to use Customer Data to run the service, and a further non-exclusive licence, extended to its partners, to access that data in order to generate Algorithm Data, Trend Data and Usage Data. It may then exploit the Algorithm Data and Trend Data for any purpose, including offering products and services to other customers, provided nothing identifies the customer or its data. Algorithm Data is defined as material derived from customer documents to optimise existing algorithms or build new ones. A separate published document, the Data Use Amendment last updated on 8 August 2025, rewrites that clause and removes the licence to generate Algorithm Data and Trend Data altogether, leaving only Usage Data. The default position therefore favours the vendor, and narrowing it is a deliberate step the buyer has to take at contract time.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting country and no hosting region are published anywhere on the site, which is the notable gap here. What is documented is the infrastructure: AWS is named repeatedly, with encryption keys managed through AWS KMS and key material held in hardware security modules that neither vendor nor Amazon staff can reach directly, application secrets in AWS Secrets Manager and Parameter Store, and TLS certificates managed by AWS and deployed through application load balancers. All datastores holding customer information, and the S3 buckets alongside them, are encrypted at rest with AES-256, and data in transit uses TLS 1.2 or higher. Access to the platform from the public internet is disabled at the edge, reachable only over an IPSec VPN, with a segmented network limiting internet traffic to load balancing infrastructure. Keys to critical infrastructure rotate quarterly. The company describes itself as global and headquartered in the United States, which speaks to its head office rather than to where data physically sits. Only categories of third parties are disclosed, never a named subprocessor list.
Where Document Crunch works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Document Crunch.
- The default data licence is the single point most worth reading twice: without the separate Data Use Amendment, the vendor and its partners may derive Algorithm Data and Trend Data from your project documents and exploit them, including toward other customers
- No hosting country or region is published, which is a blocker for any organisation under a data localisation obligation, and no named subprocessor list or DPA appears on the site
- The trust centre where the SOC 2 Type II report is said to live renders entirely in JavaScript, so its contents could not be verified from the published pages alone
- Cited answers are persuasive by design, and that is precisely the risk: a reviewer who stops verifying because the citation looks right has handed judgement to the tool, which the vendor explicitly says it does not want
- Trimble's acquisition was announced on 2 April 2026 with closing expected that quarter, so roadmap, pricing and contractual terms may all move during integration
- Commercial terms are firm: payments are non-refundable, late amounts carry 1.5% monthly interest, direct competitors are barred from access, and disputes go to arbitration in Atlanta under Georgia law
- Relying on the platform to compensate for thin in-house contract expertise can quietly erode that expertise, since the vendor is clear it supports legal judgement rather than substituting for it
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Technically undemanding. The platform is browser-based, and the vendor states there is no heavy implementation or integration to complete before insights start arriving. Single sign-on is offered to customers who want it, which does call for input from their IT team, and the Microsoft Word add-in and Procore integration need activating. The real friction is not technical: access runs through a negotiated order form, and the value depends on codifying your own reviewers' standards into playbooks, which is business work rather than engineering work.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Document Crunch
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Document Crunch.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need in-house legal counsel to get value from it?
Is it only for general contractors?
What kinds of documents can it analyse?
How does it avoid making things up?
Will my documents be used to improve the vendor's models?
How long is data kept?
How much does it cost?
Where is the data hosted?
Is there a mobile app or an API?
Who owns Document Crunch now?
Should you pick Document Crunch?
Document Crunch is a real, well-documented product rather than a promise. The company is identified, its address and phone number are published, four dated legal documents sit on the site, the security page goes into genuine detail, an Article 27 representative is named for both the EU and the UK, and the customer testimonials carry names and employers that can be checked.
Its strongest argument is traceability. Answers arrive tied to a page and a highlighted clause, and the engine is described as actively hunting for contradicting evidence before it responds. For a team that has to defend a position in a claim meeting, that is a different proposition from a general assistant producing a fluent paragraph. The sector focus is the same coin's other side: outside construction and the trades around it, there is nothing here.
Two reservations deserve to be raised before signing. The first is commercial opacity, since no price appears anywhere and every path leads to a sales conversation. The second is contractual: by default the agreement lets the vendor and its partners derive Algorithm Data and Trend Data from your documents and exploit them broadly, including toward other customers. A published amendment removes that licence, but asking for it is a deliberate step, not the default. Add the absence of any published hosting country, subprocessor list or DPA, and a buyer with data localisation obligations has real questions to put.
One more thing to watch: Trimble announced its acquisition of the company in April 2026. Integration into a listed group's construction ecosystem is likely to reshape the roadmap, the pricing and possibly the terms. Anyone evaluating the platform now should ask where that integration stands.
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