Home design & construction budgeting · India
Know what your house costs before you build it.
Answer seven questions and get a complete, itemised cost band — before you have spoken to a single contractor. Then track every rupee against it until you move in.
What the app does
Every estimate is a band
Low to high, never a single figure — because real quotes land in a range, and one number is a promise nobody can keep.
Priced for your city
Labour and cartage vary by nearly 50% across Indian cities. A Bengaluru rate applied in Guwahati is simply wrong.
Structure costed on its own
A frame is priced off spans and steel weight. It does not get cheaper because you downgraded the tiles.
Then it tracks the spend
Log payments in ten seconds and see whether you are paying ahead of the work — the usual way money goes missing on site.
16 architectural styles, 35 facilities and systems, a room-by-room breakdown, and a stage-by-stage guide to what you should check before releasing each payment.
Get the app
Archst for Android
No account, no sign-up, no ads. Everything you enter stays in a file on your own phone.
Installing it
Android asks for permission before installing an app from outside the Play Store. This is normal, and you can switch it back off afterwards.
- Tap Download APK and let the file finish downloading.
- Open it. Android will say installs from this source are blocked — tap Settings.
- Turn on Allow from this source, go back, and tap Install.
- Open Archst. There is nothing to sign up for; the first question is what you are building.
Would rather wait for Google Play? The listing is in closed testing. Message us on WhatsApp and we will add you as a tester — or just check back here, because this page gets the store link the day it goes live.
What we charge for
Everything in the app is free and always will be. These are the services you can pay for. Both are delivered by a person, on a scheduled video call, in English or Hindi.
Plan review
A 45-minute video call. A design consultant reads your brief and your budget before the call, then spends the whole session on what is wrong with it — the missing lines, the unrealistic rates, and the decisions you will regret.
Booked through our calendar at a time you choose. You get the consultant's notes afterwards by email or WhatsApp.
Design & project management
Drawings, vendor selection, quotations, site coordination and payment control, run end to end. Priced per square foot or as a percentage of project cost, agreed in writing before any work starts.
Quoted individually after a call. Nothing is charged until you have accepted a written quote.
Ask a question
Send your plan and one question over WhatsApp and a person will answer it. No charge, no obligation.
How payment works
Payments are taken online through PayU, which accepts UPI, credit and debit cards, and net banking. All prices are in Indian Rupees (INR) and include applicable taxes. Your card or UPI details are entered on PayU's own secure page and are never seen or stored by Archst.
Please read our refund and cancellation policy before you pay.
Your money stays on your phone
There is no account, no sign-up and no server holding your project. Your budget, your payments and your checklists live in a single file on your device. We cannot read them, because we never receive them.
Device backup is switched off deliberately, so your figures are not copied to anyone's cloud, including ours. The usage analytics carry no device identifier, no advertising ID and no account — and you can switch them off inside the app. Full detail is in our privacy policy.
What we are not
Archst is a design and budgeting consultancy. We do not provide licensed architectural services and we are not registered with the Council of Architecture. Every figure the app produces is an indicative Indian market band, not a quotation, and no contractor is bound by it.
We are here to stop you being surprised — not to replace the architect, structural engineer or contractor you will eventually hire.