A market rate is not one of your own rates
A guess that becomes history is a guess that gets more confident every time it is reused. The two have to be told apart, permanently.
A market rate and one of your own rates are different kinds of fact, and an estimating system that stores them in the same place will eventually price a job off the first while believing it is the second. That is not a hypothetical. It is the natural end state of any tool that lets a proposed number become a recorded one without marking the difference.
Your own rate is evidence: it is what this business actually committed on a past estimate, on a job that was won or lost at that number. A market rate is a view — useful, often good, and not a thing anybody stood behind. The moment the second is filed as the first, every later job proposes it as "our rate", and the guess compounds. Three years on nobody remembers it was ever a guess.
Three rules that keep them apart
First, the record answers before the market does. Where the business has priced something like this before, its own median answers — even a thin one, because what this company charges beats what somebody charges. The market is asked only about the lines nothing in the record can answer, which also keeps the call small and the charge proportionate.
Second, a market view is labelled as one everywhere it appears and carries a range rather than a point. An estimator prices inside a range; a single figure invites a confidence the number does not deserve.
Third, and this is the one that makes the other two safe: a rate a model proposed is kept out of the rate history permanently. A person who keeps it has accepted it and the estimate line records that they did — but it never comes back next year looking like something the business priced. The acceptance is itself an event in the golden thread, so who took the number and when is readable afterwards.
What the model is actually asked
The measured item, its unit, its quantity and the region, with the answer joined back by the position in the list rather than by the words. That last detail matters more than it should: an earlier version matched the answer to the question on the description text, and a real model paraphrases what it is shown, so every rate it returned was dropped and the screen reported that the market had no view of twenty-two lines it had just taken a view on.
It is also asked what the item costs at all at that quantity — the minimum below which no subcontractor would take the work — because on a small job that is usually the figure that decides the price. A provider that stops answering is reported on platform status rather than quietly producing nothing.
See the record being made rather than described.
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