Why We Built the BNG Price Calculator (And Why It's Free)
If you've ever opened a DEFRA metric spreadsheet and immediately felt your eyes glaze over, you're not alone.
Ian Hambleton, our CEO, has been working in the BNG market for over three years. He still finds them confusing. The DEFRA metric - the Excel file your ecologist provides showing your unit requirements and what you have on site - is the standard tool for understanding what biodiversity net gain you need. But it wasn't built for speed, clarity, or cost.
"Even if you can work out what unit types you need," says Ian, "you've then got to work out how much those would cost - and it doesn't do that for you."
That gap is what we set out to fix.
Working with an AI development company, we built a software tool that reads the metric, understands your habitat types and trading rules, and matches your requirements against our BNG pricing data to give you a clear low, medium and high market estimate - in a few seconds.
Before the calculator existed, getting a cost indication meant going out to brokers or habitat banks, waiting for quotes, and sometimes finding out the scheme was either unaffordable or had headroom you didn't know about. Now you can get that picture in seconds.
It's useful for scheme design, early-stage budgeting, and - as Ian points out - for habitat banks too, by reducing time spent on enquiries that aren't ready to move forward yet.
It is free to use.