Measure your property from the sky

Measure from the sky — and get every answer you need.

Type an address, trace the thing you are pricing, and the tool returns the number a supplier or a contractor would ask you for — cubic yards, squares of shingle, pallets of sod, gallons of water — plus what it weighs, how many trips it takes to move, and roughly what it costs installed. Here is every kind of measurement it does, with the arithmetic behind each one.

By Jared Farino — A 20+ year homeowner and DIY’er, former repair shop owner, now building AerialQuote in Buffalo, NY.
Updated September 17, 2026 · 10 min read · every figure below is an output directly from the tool.

Measuring projects around the house isn’t easy and all have the same problem. Something is sold by the yard, the square foot, the pallet or the gallon, and what needs to be measured is some odd shape in the yard. Trying to get an accurate value off of that odd shape is easy to get slightly wrong — and slightly wrong is a second trip to the supply yard, an extra pallet of sod, or a contractor who quoted you an amount you have no way to check.

The tool is the answer, trace it. You type your address, the aerial view loads, and you trace the outline of whatever you are working on — a flower bed, a roofline, a deck, the lawn, a fence line, the edge of a pond. It converts that outline into an estimate of how much you need, tells you what it weighs, how you would move it, and gives you a national price range for having it done. There is no account and nothing to install; the first trace takes about a minute.

What follows is organized the same way the tool is: by the kind of thing you are measuring.

How much mulch, topsoil or stone do I need?

Anything you spread is a volume job: square feet of bed multiplied by the depth you are spreading it. Trace the bed, pick a depth, and the tool returns cubic yards and so you know how to move it, the weight. A cubic yard is 27 cubic feet, so a yard of mulch covers 108 square feet at 3 inches and 162 square feet at 2 inches, which is why depth is the thing to get right, not area.

The depth presets run from a quarter-inch dusting, which is what you want for top-dressing a lawn, up to 6 inches for a slab base, with a custom field for anything else. Heavy material gets a compaction allowance built in — 10 percent on topsoil, 25 percent on crusher run — so the loose figure you order is bigger than the finished figure in the ground, and the tool shows both.

Then it answers the question the supply yard cannot: how are you going to move it? Mulch is light, about 375 to 575 pounds a yard dry, so a half-ton pickup takes roughly two yards and a 4-cubic-foot wheelbarrow moves a yard in seven trips. Topsoil runs 2,300 pounds a yard and the same pickup is rated for about two-thirds of one. Crusher run is 3,000 pounds a yard. The tool works this out for a half-ton pickup, a utility trailer, a tandem dump trailer and a single-axle dump truck — and it tells you plainly when the load is past what a pickup will legally carry and has become a delivery. The tool also will tell you how many trips it will take you to move it using anything from a wheelbarrow to a loader.

If you would rather buy bagged, mulch comes back as a bag count in 1.5, 2 and 3-cubic-foot sizes, always rounded up. Bags of mulch is the number one reason I made this website. How many times have you estimated you needed ‘X’ bags of mulch and ended up going back to the store for more? One yard is 13.5 of the common 2-cubic-foot bags — a number that tells most people the trunk is the wrong plan.

Concrete gets the same treatment in its own units, and it sits with the driveway jobs: pick 4, 5 or 6 inches and what is there now. A 10-by-10 pad at 4 inches is 1.23 cubic yards of finished slab; with the 5 percent waste allowance you order 1.30 yards, and if you are mixing it yourself that is 59 bags of 80-pound mix and about 4,700 pounds of material to carry. The ready-mix truck starts to look reasonable at exactly the point the tool shows you the bag count.

What is my roof’s real square footage?

A roof measured from above is smaller than the roof you would walk on, because the picture is flat and the roof is not. The tool corrects for that with the pitch. Pick low, medium or steep, or type the exact rise if you know it, and the footprint is multiplied by the pitch factor — 1.054 at 4-in-12, 1.118 at 6-in-12, 1.202 at 8-in-12, 1.414 at 12-in-12. A 2,000-square-foot footprint at 8-in-12 is 2,404 square feet of shingle, and with the 12 percent waste allowance roofers use for cuts and ridge caps you buy about 27 squares. Is this professional roofing software? NO. It’s to give homeowners and pros a quick estimate and materials list without driving to the house and climbing onto the roof.

It also tells you what the materials weigh — architectural shingle runs about 2.4 pounds a square foot, so that roof is around 6,500 pounds of material going up, and the same again coming off if there is a tear-off. Standing-seam metal is priced and weighed separately. Power washing a roof is in here too, priced by the square foot of roof surface, with a dirt-level selector.

Paint works from coverage. Trace a flat surface — a roof coating, a parking lot, a driveway — and the tool divides by the coverage of the paint on the surface you pick: 350 square feet a gallon on smooth siding, 275 on rough-sawn wood, 225 on masonry, per coat. Painting the outside of a house is different, and the tool knows it: you trace the footprint, tell it one or two stories, and it works out the wall area from the perimeter — a 40-by-30 house is 140 feet around, 1,540 square feet of wall on one story with the gable allowance, and about 9 gallons at two coats on smooth siding or 14 on stucco.

Driveway sealer is bought in 5-gallon pails, and the coverage depends on the surface: about 350 square feet a pail on a first seal or rough blacktop, 420 on a driveway that has been sealed before. Two thin coats is the standard, so a 600-square-foot driveway on its first seal is four pails.

Decking goes a step further than square feet. Trace the deck, pick the board length you will buy, and the tool produces a rough framing list: joists at 16 inches on center, the ledger, the rim, the outside joists, the hangers, and the deck-board count. It buys against real lumber lengths, so a 31-foot run comes back as two 16-foot boards spliced over a joist, not a 32-foot board that does not exist. It is a planning list, not a cut list — but it is the list that tells you whether the budget is in the right decade before you price a single board.

How many pallets of sod, or pounds of seed?

Trace the lawn under Land and you get square feet and acres, which is what everything on a lawn is quoted against. Sod comes on 450-square-foot pallets, and the tool adds 8 percent for cutting around beds and edges, so a 2,000-square-foot lawn is 4.8 pallets. Then it tells you the part the sod farm forgets to mention: a pallet weighs about 2,475 pounds. That is more than a half-ton pickup is rated to carry, and five of them are nearly six tons. Sod is a delivery.

Seed is lighter and the arithmetic is kinder. The tool uses 250 square feet to the pound — a new-lawn rate — so the same 2,000 square feet is 8 pounds of seed. If you are overseeding an existing lawn rather than starting bare ground, you can halve that.

Two more things live under the land tab. Lawn mowing turns the acreage into time on site and a per-visit range, assuming a zero-turn mower sized to the lot. And Just the acreage does exactly that, with no pricing attached — useful for anyone who has been told a lot is “about half an acre” and would like to know.

To measure the whole lot, trace it yourself — it takes four clicks on a typical suburban rectangle. Automatic property lines drawn from county records are coming as a Pro feature.

Measuring a fence, a gutter run or a string of Christmas lights

Some jobs are a line, not a shape. Switch to Linear, click along the run, and you get feet — there is no need to close the shape. Each run can be banked with “Add run” so a fence with three sides, or gutters on four elevations, adds up in one total.

Gutters take a downspout count and a drop height, so the vertical feet are also in the total. Christmas lights and anything else that runs up a gable take the pitch correction: a sloped run is longer than it looks from overhead, by the same factor as a roof — 20 percent longer at 8-in-12. Rebar on an 18-inch grid works from the slab area rather than a line. Fence, landscape edging, drain tile, water and irrigation pipe, electrical conduit and direct-burial wire are all here, each with its own waste allowance and price range.

Will a pool fit in my backyard?

“Will it fit?” is a different kind of question and it has its own mode. Trace your yard, then drop a shape on it to scale and drag it where you want it. The presets cover the things people actually ask about: 16-by-32 and 18-by-36 inground pools, a 24-foot round above-ground, a 15-by-30 oval, party tents at 20-by-20, 20-by-30 and 20-by-40, a 12-by-16 and a 16-by-20 deck, a 10-by-12 shed, a 14-foot trampoline, a fire-pit circle, a parking space, a volleyball court, and a custom rectangle, circle or oval for anything else.

It will not tell you where the setback line is — that is your town’s job — but it will tell you in thirty seconds whether the pool you have been looking at leaves room to walk past it.

How many gallons is my pool, pond or lake?

Trace the water’s edge, give it an average depth in feet, and the tool returns gallons, liters and — once it is big enough to matter — acre-feet, which is how anyone who owns a pond talks about it. For a pool the average depth is roughly the shallow end plus the deep end, divided by two; a 3-foot shallow and 8-foot deep end is a 5-foot average, and the presets are built around that. Most backyard ponds run 2 to 4 feet.

A 16-by-32 inground pool at a 5-foot average is 512 square feet of surface, 2,560 cubic feet of water and about 19,150 gallons. The tool then answers the three questions that follow. What does it weigh: 8.34 pounds a gallon, so nearly 160,000 pounds — and a 24-foot round above-ground pool at 4 feet is about 13,500 gallons and 56 tons, which is the number to know before it goes on a deck. How long does the hose run: one 5/8-inch garden hose at ordinary house pressure moves about 9 gallons a minute, so that inground pool is around 35 hours on one hose, or half that on two. And what it costs to fill: from the tap, water plus sewer, somewhere between $4 and $12 per thousand gallons depending on the utility, so roughly $75 to $230 for the pool above — and many utilities will credit a pool fill against the sewer charge if you call first. Trucked in, bulk water comes in 6,000-gallon loads at 5 to 12 cents a gallon delivered, which the tool also prices, mostly so you can see why nobody does it unless the well is dry.

A pond that holds its own water does not need filling, but the gallons still matter: they are what a pump, a treatment dose, an aerator or a fish load is sized against, and “about an acre-foot” is a far more useful thing to tell a supplier than “pretty big”.

How accurate is it?

The geometry is not the limiting factor; the line you draw is. The tool measures on the real map projection and its area and length arithmetic checks against surveyed ground truth to a fraction of a percent. What varies is the picture. The imagery source and its resolution in inches per pixel are printed in the corner of the map, and the “Square up” button will straighten a hand-traced rectangle so the corners are true right angles. Trace the edge of the driveway, not the shadow beside it, and you will be within a few percent of a tape — which is closer than most quotes are to each other.

The prices are national ranges, and the tool says so on every result. Once three or more contractors in your county have reported a job like yours to the price database, their average replaces the national figure — and it is held for 45 days before it publishes, so a single outlier cannot move it.

For contractors: the same trace, your own numbers

Switch the tool to Pro and the price range becomes your quote. Enter your billed labor rate, your production rate for the job, your material with your markup already in it, disposal, equipment, other charges and your overhead-and-profit percentage, and it produces crew hours, labor, material, fees and a total — per job type, saved in your browser, so the second driveway you price this week is two clicks. A checkbox shows you exactly what a homeowner sees for the same trace, which is worth a look before the conversation about why your number is different.

Measuring is free in Pro mode too. If you want to contribute a quote to the public price database it is anonymous — job type, material and total for the region, never your name, your customer or the address — and it helps every contractor in the county by giving homeowners a real local figure instead of a national guess. The For pros page has the rest: the job board, saved addresses, and what the account does.

Start with your own address. The tool is at the top of this page. Type it in, trace the first thing you have been meaning to price, and see what comes back.