For subcontractors
Subcontractors sign the industry's worst contracts: drafted upstream, passed down on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, and priced as if the risk clauses will never bite. Contract review for subcontractors is about one thing — protecting the cash you've already earned — and it starts before you sign.
Head contractors flow risk down: the LDs, the design gaps, the program risk they accepted upstream get pushed into your subcontract, often amplified. You carry the labour and material cost up front, then the contract decides when — and whether — the money comes back. That's why review effort should follow the cash.
Pay-when-paid clauses make your money contingent on someone else's. Retention holds 5% hostage for years. Uncapped LDs can eat the whole margin. Time bars quietly delete claims you've already earned. Every subcontract review starts with these four.
In every market ContractorCounter Review covers, payment-protection law overrides contract terms: security of payment in Australia, the UK Construction Act, prompt payment in Canada, the NZ Construction Contracts Act, and US prompt-payment and lien laws. A good review flags clauses that pretend those rights away.
You priced the job from the drawings — the contract arrives after, with the risk attached. Drop it into ContractorCounter Review before you return it: US$19, every risky clause highlighted with a concrete negotiation ask, and the full checklist covered without an afternoon of reading.
Common questions
Because subcontracts are where risk lands. Head contractors have commercial teams and lawyers on retainer; subcontractors get the flowed-down version of every risk with none of that support. The clauses that hurt most — pay-when-paid, uncapped LDs, short time bars, oversized retention — are aimed specifically at the subcontract level, and the subbie is usually the least equipped party to spot them.
Statutory payment rights help — security-of-payment and prompt-payment laws void some of the worst clauses regardless of what you signed. But statute doesn't cap liquidated damages, fix a one-sided indemnity, rewrite ambiguous scope, or restore a claim you lost to a valid notice requirement. The contract still governs most of the relationship; the review tells you which parts of it to push back on while you still can.
ContractorCounter Review costs a flat US$19 per contract, whatever the page count — no subscription, no account, no demo call. The AI reads the contract and shows you what it found (how many issues, how severe, on which pages) before you pay anything; the $19 unlocks the full marked-up review with every clause highlighted and a plain-English concern and negotiation ask for each.
The contract PDF never leaves your browser — only its extracted text is processed to produce the review, and it is not used to train AI models. Findings are stored temporarily to deliver your purchase (7 days unpurchased, 30 days after unlock) and then deleted automatically.
No. ContractorCounter Review is an AI-powered first-pass review that flags risky, one-sided, and ambiguous clauses so you know exactly what to question. It is not a law firm and its output is not legal advice — for contracts worth serious money, take the marked-up review to a construction lawyer and spend their billable hours on judgment instead of reading.
Open a plan set, mark it up, and take quantities off the sheet — in your browser, on any device, with nothing to install.
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