Your lots build the shed on screen with the buyer standing beside them, watch the price move as the size, the roof style, and the doors change, and hand over a quote before anyone leaves the gravel. Your rules decide what can be built. Each lot sells on its own price list.
Shed design software builds a shed on screen option by option and prices it as it goes. A dealer or a buyer picks the size, the roof style, the siding, the doors, and the windows, and the total moves with every choice. For a manufacturer selling through lots, the same software carries the rules your shop builds to and the price list each dealer sells on, so a building that gets quoted is one you can actually haul and set. The name covers two different tools, and the difference is what gets priced. One is a drawing program a homeowner opens to sketch a shed for their own yard, and it ends at a plan with no money on it. The other is the one a manufacturer runs: an option list, the rules between those options, and a price against every one of them, ending at a quote a dealer can hand to the buyer in front of them. This page is about the second.
Every size you offer, every roof style, every siding and door and window, and a price against each one. It also holds the parts that never fit on a sheet: which combinations your shop will not build, which sizes your trailer can set on which sites, and what each lot pays. A change to a steel or siding cost reaches every quote written after it.
This is not a page somebody browses for an afternoon. It runs on a tablet in a display lot, in a sales office that is itself one of the buildings, or on a phone at a customer's property while they point at where the shed goes. It is judged on how fast it reaches a number the buyer will sign, and on whether that number is one you can honour.
Shed design software is this industry's name for a category that runs well past sheds. If that category is the open question rather than the shed side of it, what a product configurator is starts from the beginning.
Written by Teodoro Pickett and kept current by the team that builds Dealect, in Mississauga, Canada. Who builds Dealect.
Sizes, roof styles, siding, doors, and add-ons multiply into thousands of buildings. A printed sheet holds a few dozen of them, and everything else gets worked out by hand.
Steel, OSB, and treated lumber all move, and the sheet in the sales office does not move with them. The gap between the number on the page and the number this week comes out of somebody's margin, usually yours, and nobody finds out until the building is already framed.
Give twelve dealers one price list and you get twelve versions of it inside a season. Each one has a local adjustment, an option that was dropped last year, a size that was never approved. The one you audit is never the one being quoted.
A 14 ft wide down a lane the truck cannot turn. A loft under a lean-to roof. A roll-up door on a wall run the trusses will not carry. Nothing on a paper form checks any of it, so it is caught at the site, where the only moves left are eating the trip or eating the build.
The sheet stops at 12 by 24 and the buyer wants 12 by 32. Somebody works it out on the back of the page, or calls the office and waits. The buyer is standing in the gravel while that happens, and the lot down the road is open until six.
A single storage building range, broken into the groups a lot salesperson walks a buyer through, with the multiplication done out loud.
6
Size, roof style, siding, doors, windows, and what goes inside. The order a lot salesperson asks them in.
26
Eight sizes, four roof styles, four sidings, four door choices, three window counts, three interiors.
4,608
8 × 4 × 4 × 4 × 3 × 3. Every one of them a real quote, and none of them on the printed sheet.
Six groups is a conservative reading of a storage range. Add a colour choice, a porch, or a second door and the count moves again, in a direction a printed sheet cannot follow. Which is why the sheet stops being the price list and starts being a sample of one.
None of those 4,608 include the delivery zone, the blocking and levelling, or the anchoring your county asks for. Every one of them changes the figure the buyer signs, and every one of them is decided after the building is picked. That is three more multipliers sitting on top of the six.
The four moves a good lot salesperson already makes, with the numbers right at every one of them.
Step 01 · The questions, in the order a lot asks them
The screen asks what your salesperson already asks, and in the same order: the size first, then the roof style, then the siding and the doors that depend on both. Your rules sit behind every answer, so a loft under a lean-to roof or a roll-up on a wall the trusses will not carry is never offered. A salesperson who has never memorised your line still specifies a building correctly.
Step 02 · Every click, the same second
Each option carries its own price, so the total moves the moment the building does. Gauge, span, door size, window count, delivery zone: they price on the line rather than in somebody's head. Each lot works from its own price list and sees its own margin while it builds, and your cost price stays on your side.
Step 03 · A document, not a promise to send one
The configuration becomes the quote while the buyer is still on the lot. Line items, options, delivery, and the total come straight off the building that was just built, so nothing is transcribed and there is no second document to assemble that evening.
Step 04 · From the lot to the cut list
When the buyer signs, the approved building becomes the order, then the build sheet and the bill of materials your shop works from. That same record can carry into your ERP and the buyer into your CRM, without anyone keying one building twice. Each lot watches its own orders move without calling your office to ask.
Six things a shed, carport, or post frame manufacturer is actually choosing between, and none of them is the number of renders in the demo.
One choice requires or rules out another: a loft only under a gable or a barn roof, a roll-up only in a wall run that will carry it, a wider span only at the heavier gauge. The rule lives in the software rather than in the head of whoever has been there longest.
Pricing sits on the options themselves, so the number recalculates on every click. Nobody waits on the office to learn what going from 10 by 16 to 12 by 20 costs, and no quote leaves the lot at a price that was already old when it was written.
Your network does not sell at one price. A lot two states away carries a different freight zone, a different margin, and sometimes a different half of your line. Each one quotes on the list you set for it, sees its own margin while it builds, and never sees another lot's numbers or yours.
A shed quote is not finished at the building. The zone it is going to, the blocks and levelling the site needs, the anchoring the county asks for: all of it is modelled as priced options like any other, answered on the lot rather than added by phone two days later.
A buyer standing beside a 10 by 12 cannot picture the 12 by 24 with the porch. Showing it changes what gets signed, because the build is approved on the strength of being seen rather than described, and fewer things get agreed to and then argued about after the deposit.
The document is generated from the configuration rather than assembled beside it, and the same record becomes the build sheet and the bill of materials. What the buyer signed and what the shop receives are one thing, which is the whole reason a building gets made right the first time.
The three lines a lot usually carries together price on completely different logic. That is a rules problem, not a rendering problem.
| On a configured quote | Storage sheds | Carports and covers | Post frame buildings |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the buyer picks | Size, roof style, siding, doors, windows, and what goes inside | Span, leg height, roof style, gauge, panel colour, and how much of it gets closed in | Footprint, ceiling height, roof pitch, door openings, wainscot, and the interior finish |
| What decides the price | The footprint, the siding, and how much of the interior is finished | The tube gauge, the span, and the certification the location needs | The clear span, the post and truss spacing, and the openings cut into the walls |
| What has to be checked first | Whether the site can be reached and levelled, and whether the loft fits under that roof | What the anchors are going into, and the wind and snow load the location rates for | The engineering behind the span, and the openings the trusses will carry |
| How it arrives | Built in your shop and hauled in on a trailer | Fabricated and installed on site, usually in a day | A framing package and a crew, over a week or more |
| Where the quote goes wrong | A size or an option that was never on the sheet | A certified build quoted at non-certified pricing | An opening added after the truss layout was set |
A carport configurator and a 3D barn builder look like one product to a buyer and are not one product underneath. One prices off tube gauge and wind rating, one off truss layout and clear span, one off footprint and finish. A single engine runs all three once the rules are yours and the price list is per lot rather than per catalogue. Sheds and carports usually go in first because they are the two your dealers already have standing on the ground, and the post frame side follows as soon as its engineering rules are written down.
The wind and snow figures a certified build gets quoted against are not ours to set. They come out of the load standard the location is rated under, ASCE/SEI 7, Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures. What a configurator has to do is carry that rating into the rule and into the price, so the quote and the engineering agree before a crew is booked.
A display lot holds ten or twelve buildings. The six option groups above make 4,608. Every buyer who walks on wants something that is nearly one of the ten, and the sale turns on how quickly the nearly becomes a number.
That is the gap a screen closes. The buyer picks the size that is not on the gravel, the door they actually need, the colour that matches the house, and watches the price answer each time. They are approving a building they can see rather than one they have to imagine from a shed that is two feet too small.
Everyone selling this says a configurator needs your product rules. Nobody says what that means for a shed shop on a Tuesday, or what the thing costs.
No CAD, no engineered model, no 3D artist on staff. A shed shop's own build sheets and a set of photographs off the lot carry more of what a configurator needs than a drawing file does. What it has to learn is the option list and the rules, not the geometry.
A browser on the lot's own tablet. Nothing for a dealer to install, nothing for anyone's IT to approve, and it opens on mobile data in a gravel lot with two bars, because that is where it gets used.
Priced per manufacturer rather than per seat. Signing your fourteenth lot costs what the first one did, and the bill does not move when a dealer hires a second salesperson in spring. What sets your number is how deep the building line is, and you hear it on a 30-minute demo call.
Seasonality is the thing worth saying out loud here. A shed line wants to be live before spring rather than during it, and getting one range in and quoting takes weeks rather than months, which is the reason the first range goes in on its own. The rest of the model is on what a configurator costs.
You build in one shop and sell through independent lots that carry your range alongside their own.
Crews installing on site, quoting off gauge, span, and what the county rates the location for.
Framing packages sold on clear span and openings, where an engineering rule sits behind half the choices.
Sheds are the vertical where the manufacturer-and-lot structure is clearest, which is why this page exists before the others. The rest of the platform sits behind it: the portal each lot signs into is our b2b customer portal, the seller's screen is the sales configurator, and the view your buyer turns around is the 3d product configurator. Two more vertical pages are live if you want the same argument in another product's language, the sauna configurator and the outdoor kitchen configurator. The whole platform is on the Dealect homepage.
Yes, and carport design software is not a separate purchase here. A carport prices on tube gauge, span, leg height, panel colour, and the certification the location needs, which is a different rule set from a storage building rather than a different product. Both run on one engine, so a lot carrying sheds and covers quotes them from one screen on one price list.
Yes. Every lot gets its own price list and sees its own margin as the building changes. No lot sees another lot's numbers, and the cost you build to stays on your side. That is the part a shared spreadsheet has never managed, and it is why a network of twelve lots does not need twelve versions of your sheet.
No. Your build sheets, your size and price list, and photographs of finished buildings off the lot are enough. What the configurator has to learn is the option list, the rules between the options, and the prices, not the geometry. CAD helps where you already have it and never decides whether this can start.
Yes, and the rules are the harder half. A post frame building designer has to carry clear span, post and truss spacing, roof pitch, and which openings the trusses will take before it prices anything. Once those rules are written down, a barn, a shop, or an arena configures the same way a storage shed does.
Yes. A barn is the building where seeing it matters most, because nobody pictures a 40 by 60 clear span from a line on a price sheet. The barn turns on screen in the options that were picked, and the loft, the roof pitch, and the door openings move with it. What makes the quote safe to sign is the rule set underneath rather than the picture, because a barn that renders and cannot be framed is still a barn that cannot be framed.
The configurator produces the cash price and the quote. Your rent to own partner's agreement is written off that figure. The value their term is calculated from is the one the building was actually priced at, on that lot's list, rather than a number worked out again by hand at the desk.
This configuration runs in front of a salesperson on the lot or on your own site. What changes is which price list it reads and how far it goes. A public build and price ends at an enquiry with the configuration attached to it. A dealer signed into the portal carries the same build through to a quote and an order.
It is priced per manufacturer rather than per seat, so adding a salesperson or signing another lot does not move the bill, and your dealers never pay for access to the portal they quote in. What sets your number is how deep the building line is, how many of your own rules have to be written down before it can price a building safely, and which systems it has to connect to on either end. Starting with one range rather than everything you build is what keeps the first figure down, and it is also what gets a lot quoting before spring rather than during it. There is no self-serve signup and no list price on the site, because a published number would tell you nothing true about your own line. You hear the figure on a 30-minute demo call.
The manufacturer. The option list, the rules, and every price list belong to the shop that builds the buildings, so it is bought once and switched on for every lot carrying that range, and no lot pays for access to the portal it quotes in. If you are running a lot rather than a factory, that makes the first move sending this to whoever sets your prices, and a lot carrying ranges from two manufacturers sees each one turned on separately.
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Bring one storage or carport range to a 30-minute call and we will configure it, price it on a dealer's list, and produce the quote while you watch. We reply by email to set a time.
Your call is with the Dealect team.
