Most building services engineers don't realise how much their company spends on scattered tools. The cost adds up — in licenses, subscriptions, and the biggest hidden expense: time.
British Standards
A single standard costs around £100–£300 to purchase. A mechanical design team might need 10+ standards for typical projects — that's £1,000–£3,000 in one-off purchases. And standards get revised. Staying current means buying updates or relying on someone else's copy.
Standards access platforms
BSOL subscriptions start around £2,000 per year for a small team. Enterprise CIBSE Knowledge Portal access can run £5,000–£10,000 annually. These platforms give you search and access, but they're a fixed cost whether you use them daily or monthly.
Calculation tools
Commercial HVAC software (IES, Hevacomp, and similar) runs £2,000–£8,000 per seat per year. Simpler tools like AmTech or Trimble cost £500–£2,000. Add electrical design software, BIM coordination tools, and the overhead of maintaining multiple systems.
The time cost
The biggest hidden expense. If engineers spend 30 minutes per day searching for data across PDFs, spreadsheets, and emails, that's 125+ hours per year. At £35 per hour, that's over £4,000 of engineering time wasted on admin — per engineer.
What MEP Desk costs
MEP Desk is £9.99 per month (annual) — £119 per year. The free tier is available with no trial period. One standard purchase can cost more than an entire year of MEP Desk. Every calculator, every reference, every project tool — in one place.
See pricing — lock in beta pricing before v3.0.
MEP Desk doesn't replace detailed modelling software like IES for thermal simulation or BIM tools for coordination. It replaces the everyday calculation, reference, and project management workflow that engineers do on every single project.