← Retaining Wall Bid Calculator
This calculator vs. Aspire
Two different shapes: Aspire is an account-based business-management platform for running a hardscape or landscape company's whole operation. This page is a free, private worksheet for one question — what should this retaining wall cost, given its height, drainage, and geogrid — before you send the bid.
What each tool is for
Aspire is a cloud business-management platform, founded in 2013 by Kevin Kehoe and Mark Tipton, headquartered in Chesterfield, Missouri. It is built for landscape maintenance and construction contractors — including hardscape and retaining-wall crews — as well as irrigation, snow and ice management, and commercial cleaning companies, and has been part of ServiceTitan since ServiceTitan's 2021 acquisition of it. It bundles CRM and lead tracking, estimating, scheduling, purchasing, job costing, mobile crew time tracking, invoicing, and accounting and payroll integration into one ongoing subscription account, with a mobile app for crews in the field. Its own plans are tiered by a contractor's annual revenue rather than sold at one flat price, and no dollar figure for any plan is published on its site — pricing is reached by requesting a demo. Aspire's own pricing page is not reachable from this session to confirm today's exact tier names or any dollar figure, so no price for it is invented here: only its well-documented identity and category — a business-management platform serving landscape construction, irrigation, snow and ice, and cleaning contractors, sold as a revenue-tiered subscription account — are stated, and no dollar amount for Aspire appears on this page.
This calculator does none of what Aspire does. It does not track a lead, schedule a crew, or invoice a customer, and it stores no customer or job record on a server. It takes one wall — length, exposed height, and embedment below grade, wall type (segmental block, timber, poured concrete, or boulder), drain-stone volume, geogrid layers, 90° corners, and whether the job needs a permit only or an engineer stamp plus permit — plus loaded crew cost, payroll burden, overhead, and target margin, and turns that into the install price, the price per linear foot, the price per face square foot, the effective crew hourly rate, and the walk-away price below which the job loses money — plus, if you already have a number on the table, a check of whether it clears that walk-away floor, and a single printable customer proposal for that one wall. It runs free in any browser, keeps no account, and uploads nothing you type.
| Question | Where to answer it |
|---|---|
| I run a hardscape or landscape company and need leads, estimates, scheduling, purchasing, and invoicing tracked in one system across every crew and every job. | Aspire, or a comparable business-management platform — running the whole operation is not something this calculator does. |
| What should I charge for this retaining wall, given its height, embedment, drainage, and geogrid? | This calculator — free, instant, private, no account. |
| How much does going from a 3 ft garden wall to a 6 ft engineered wall actually add, beyond the extra linear feet? | This calculator's separate face-area, drain-stone, and geogrid-layer line items — a flat per-foot rate hides all three. |
| A customer's budget is below what I'd normally quote. Does it still clear my walk-away floor? | This calculator's proposed-price check — it flags a price below break-even before you agree to it. |
| I need my whole crew scheduling, purchasing, and job costing running from one shared account across the season. | Aspire — built as an ongoing, account-based platform for exactly that job. |
| How does the math behind a retaining-wall bid actually work? | This calculator's own pricing walkthrough. |
| Do I need to create an account or sign up to use the tool? | This calculator: no. Aspire is used through a subscription account, and its site describes plans as scaled to a contractor's annual revenue rather than sold to a solo operator at a flat price. |
Most hardscape and landscape companies get different value from each: Aspire (or a comparable platform) for running the company's whole lead-to-invoice operation as an ongoing, revenue-tiered subscription, and a private calculator like this one for an instant, no-login answer to what one retaining wall should cost from its height, drainage, and geogrid before a business system is involved. This page's own figures are a pricing model, not a lead record, a scheduled job, or a signed contract.
This tool needs no account and no sign-in: it is a static page, the arithmetic runs in your browser, and once it has loaded it keeps working with the connection off.
Common questions
Should I use this calculator or Aspire?
They do different jobs, and a hardscape or landscape company of any size will likely end up touching both eventually. Aspire, founded in 2013 by Kevin Kehoe and Mark Tipton and headquartered in Chesterfield, Missouri, is a cloud business-management platform built for landscape maintenance and construction (including hardscape and retaining-wall crews), irrigation, snow and ice management, and commercial cleaning contractors, and has been part of ServiceTitan since ServiceTitan's 2021 acquisition of it. It bundles CRM and lead tracking, estimating, scheduling, purchasing, job costing, mobile crew time tracking, invoicing, and accounting and payroll integration into one ongoing subscription account, with plans tiered by a contractor's annual revenue rather than one flat price, and no dollar figure published for any plan — you request a demo to get a quote. This calculator does one narrower thing: starting from one wall's length, exposed height, and embedment, wall type, drain-stone volume, geogrid layers, corners, and the engineer-stamp-plus-permit step a per-linear-foot quote hides, plus loaded crew cost, payroll burden, overhead, and target margin, it turns that into the install price, the price per linear foot, the price per face square foot, the effective hourly rate, and the walk-away price below which the job loses money, plus a printable customer proposal for that one wall — before any of it touches a business-management system. It runs free in any browser, keeps no account, and uploads nothing you type. A hardscape or landscape company that already tracks leads, schedules crews, and invoices across a whole season is better served by Aspire or a comparable platform; a contractor who wants an instant, private answer to what one retaining wall should cost from its height, drainage, and geogrid before opening a business system is in the right place here.
Is this page affiliated with Aspire?
No. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Aspire Software or ServiceTitan, Inc., which acquired Aspire in 2021. Aspire and ServiceTitan are trademarks of their respective owners, named here only to describe what this calculator is and is not.
Open the Retaining Wall Bid Calculator to price your own job.