A decision system made by two architects, that gives you the right tools when you need them.
Nothing is drip-fed and nothing unlocks later.
10 modules and 3 reference volumes, in the order the decisions actually arrive. Module 2 is about choosing a plot, and it is written to be read before the token money leaves your account rather than after.
Where the reading turns into your own numbers. You put in your own plot size and your own three quotes, and what comes out is a page you can put on the table in front of your architect.
Tell us where you are when you set up your project and you get the short list worth doing now. We have watched people read the whole thing in a fortnight and remember none of it by the month it mattered.
A question box over all of it. It answers out of our own material and shows you the passage it came from, so you can go and read around it.
From ₹35,000, once. Module 1 is free and you can read the whole of it today.
Longer, probably, than the rest of your family knows.
Maybe you're still saving. Maybe the plot is bought and sitting untouched. Maybe the walls are already up and something didn't go right.
You know the family that ended up ₹40L over budget. You know the plot with the title problem that came to light after the token amount was paid. You know the friend whose living room turns into a furnace in April because the drawings were signed off before anyone thought about which way the windows faced.
Some are relatives. Some are friends. Every one of those stories is different, and the shape of them is always the same.
Some are you, at month six of a project that was supposed to be simpler than this.
"We're careful people. We'll read up."
"Our contractor came recommended."
"The architect will handle it."
None of the people in those stories were ignorant. They all started exactly where you are.
Any of this sound familiar?
And then the mistakes start to pile up.
Because even with a good architect, you still have to decide
There's a moment in most builds, usually around month four, when you realise you've been approving things you didn't fully understand.
The concrete is poured.
The wall is where it is.
The cost of a half-understood decision has just become permanent.
Each person on your team is responsible for one slice, and most of them, in our experience, do that slice competently and in good faith.
But explaining the whole system to you was never part of anyone's fee. It couldn't be. If your architect stopped every meeting to teach you construction management, they'd be losing money on your project.
But you already know all this,
because you have watched it happen.
Time and time again.
Now is your chance to do something about it.
Read in the order a real build happens, from whether you're ready at all to the day you take handover. Each tool produces something you hand to your architect or contractor.
Plus the Vastu Companion, a cost reference to check quotes against, and build notes on the small things that lift the quality of the finished house. The costs come as ranges rather than clean single figures. You cannot plan a year of your finances around a number until you know the top of it.
See everything that's includedFive problems come up in almost every build. Open one.
The tools behind those five.
Every line a first quote leaves out: approvals, site development, professional fees, contingency, GST, the connections, the compound wall. It returns a total, a stage-wise cash flow, and a funding gap if there is one.
Set which way your plot faces and see where the heat lands through the day. What comes out is a list of specific questions for your architect, before the drawings are issued.
What to check at each stage, on your phone, while you are standing on the site. Every visit logged with dates and photographs, so you have a record rather than a memory.
Up to 3 contractors compared line by line across 45 priced items and 9 commercial terms. It flags what one of them left out and the others priced, and where a rate is far off the rest.
Your loan disbursement against your contractor's payment schedule, month by month. The two are offset by design, and the gap between them comes out of your own pocket. This shows how wide it gets, and when.
Your whole build on one chart, from today to the year after you move in. Order deadlines calculated backwards from your dates, and a flag where the slab lands inside the monsoon window.
Most guidance arrives at the beginning, when you can't use it yet. This tracks your phase and puts up what matters now.
You tell us where you are when you set up your project, and you get the handful of things worth doing at that stage. Finish them and the next stage opens, with its own list and an email from us on what that stage is really about and what tends to go wrong in it. If you stop, nothing chases you.
Not a nudge on a calendar. When the Contractor Evaluation raises a hard stop, or the scorecard comes back Red, or a foundation pour lands inside the monsoon window, you are told at the moment the tool works it out.
A build generates a few hundred documents in its first year: drawings, quotes, receipts, approvals, agreements. Your project holds the record of them in one place, so you are not scrolling through a year of photographs looking for the quote somebody sent you in March.
Record each visit against the stage the build is in, with what you checked, what you found and photographs of it. Six months later, when something is disputed, you have a dated record instead of a recollection.
Bookmark a section, highlight a passage, and both collect under the module they came from. You read Module 3 in February. In September you want one paragraph of it and you will not remember which one. This is how you get back to it without reading the module again.
Your decisions, your notes, and everything the tools made for you, kept together. When a choice gets questioned six months later, the part you have lost is the reason behind it. Nobody writes that down at the time.
Nothing is locked. Every module and tool is open from the day you join. The guidance decides what to put in front of you, never what to keep from you.
Try it. Ask what to look for when choosing windows.
Nobody searches for a drip groove. You can only ask about the things you know exist.
It arrives in the same confident voice whether it is right for a house in Mysore or right for a house in Minnesota. It does not know your plot, your bylaws, this year's rates in your city, or the openings your contractor has already cast. It will answer whatever you put to it, including the question you should not have been asking.
The parts that are wrong look exactly like the parts that are right. Telling them apart needs you to already know the answer, which is the thing you went looking for.
We use these tools ourselves, most days. They are quick, and they are useful once you know enough to judge what comes back. Knowing enough to judge it is what this is for.
Every module, every tool, the 607 build notes and the cost reference are behind a question box. Ask it what to check before you release the second instalment, or what a drip groove is, and it answers out of that material and shows you the section it came from, so you can read around the answer instead of taking it and running.
When your question goes past what we have written, it tells you so before it answers. We would rather you knew which of the two you were reading.
It is an assistant, not a professional. Anything you plan to act on, put to your architect, engineer or lawyer first.
Vanessa trained in architecture and urban planning in Poland, and won a national award for the design of an urban district. Lakshman trained in architectural technology and construction management in Denmark and came back to India in 2017. We met in 2016 on the sustainability team of a festival, and have been partners in work and in life since.
For six years we ran a café and a small hostel in Bangalore. Both taught us more about how buildings actually get used, and how they fail, than a studio would have. We closed them in early 2025, and now practise from Mysore, with two children.
Here is the part that matters more than any of that.
Most of what gets built in this country is not designed by an architect. It goes up from memory, from what the neighbour did, from a plan drawn to fit the plot and nothing else. No concept, no brief, often no drawing worth the name. It is the reason so many houses are hot when they could have been cool, dark when they could have been light, and cost a third more than they needed to.
We do not spend our working lives looking at other architects' buildings. We spend them in ordinary houses, on ordinary sites, in the middle of ordinary builds, with the families paying for them. That is where you see what actually goes wrong. It is almost never a failure of taste. It is a decision taken in the wrong week, by someone who did not know it was a decision.
What we want is for the general standard of building here to come up. Not by telling people to hire better architects. By making better clients.
A client who knows what they are looking at gets better work out of everyone they hire: the architect, the structural engineer, the contractor, and every tradesperson after them. They know what good work looks like, what it should cost, and what to ask for. That is not a threat to the professionals on your team. It is the best thing that can happen to them, and most of them will tell you so.
So this is the information and the tools, in the order the decisions arrive. It exists so that the money you were always going to spend buys you a more functional house, and so the 18 to 36 months of getting there are something you can manage rather than something you endure.
We'll say one more thing directly. We are not India's most senior residential architects, and there are practices with far more houses behind them than ours. What we have is a decade of watching the same handful of mistakes recur, project after project, and the reference we wished we could hand across the table on day one.
And that is why we created
Build Informed.
A few things we decided at the start, and haven't moved off.
Not cement, not tile, not fixtures, not fittings. The day we recommend a brand, you can't trust the advice.
We are paid by you and by nobody else on your project.
So you can read what you're paying for before you pay for it.
We can't promise you a build with no surprises. If someone can, be careful.
But if "worth it" means:
Then yes. That's what this holds up.
On an ₹85L build, ₹35,000 is 0.4% of what you are about to spend. Even the small mistakes run ₹50,000 to ₹1 lakh, and there is no ceiling on the big ones. Catch one before it happens and Build Informed has paid for itself.
₹35,000
All 8 modules and all 24 tools. The Vastu Companion and Extension. The Build Notes and the Cost Reference. Ask, the assistant over the whole library. Stage-by-stage guidance and emails. Your own bookmarks, decisions and tool outputs, kept together. A reduced consultation rate.
Get Self-serve₹79,000
Everything in Self-serve, plus a 25-minute call with Lakshman after you join, a written review of your filled-in tools and their results at each phase transition (up to 9, back within 5 working days), and Modules 9 and 10, on the emotional load of building and what makes a home feel right.
Get GuidedTake Self-serve. It is the whole system, and most people building one house do not need more than that.
Take Guided if you are running the build from abroad, if you and your partner are not yet agreed on the budget, or if you have never read a contractor's quote before and would rather someone who has read a few hundred of them tell you what yours says.
25 places a year. When they are taken, Guided closes until January.
Module 1 is free. After you buy you can open one more paid module and still ask for a full refund within 15 days.
One payment. Lifetime access for your own projects. No subscription. Pay by UPI, card or netbanking. Move from Self-serve to Guided later for ₹44,000, if places remain that year.
Compare the two in fullTestimonial 1
Testimonial 2
Testimonial 3
The whole module, not a sample. Whether you're ready to build at all, with the readiness scorecard and the budget calculator alongside it.
If it's useful, the rest will be. If it isn't, you've lost an evening and learnt something about your own readiness either way.
No. It's a decision-safety system: checklists, tools, and guidance that surfaces each decision as your build reaches it.
No. Those come from your architect. This makes you the client who briefs them well and catches what's missing before it's built.
It doesn't replace them. It helps you understand what they're showing you and decide faster, which makes their job easier and their work better.
The decisions ahead of you are still open. Set your phase and put your attention on what you can still get right.
Everything is written and asynchronous. You read at your midnight and brief your family in the morning, theirs. There's a module for running the project from outside India.
No. There are no brand recommendations in the material, for exactly that reason.
Module 1 is free, so you can judge the depth, tone, and approach before paying anything. After you purchase, you may open one further paid module and take your time with it. If Build Informed isn't right for your project, tell us within 15 days of purchase and we'll refund you in full. Eligibility ends at whichever comes first: 15 days from purchase, or the moment you open a second paid module. We do it this way because one complete paid module, on top of the free one, is enough to know whether this works for you.
Free, three tools included, and it will tell you something useful about your own build before you spend anything.