Customer Story
How Buildertrend is using Iconik to save $680k in just three years while streamlining creative operations
Founded in 2006 in Omaha, Nebraska, Buildertrend offers industry-leading construction management software that helps contractors operate their businesses — from scheduling and estimating to client communication and job costing. Today, the company serves more than 20,000 contractors across 100 countries, employs over 700 people, and is trusted on more than half of all new home builds in the United States.
Behind that product, though, is a marketing and creative operation with real complexity: designers, videographers, a corporate communications team, remote contractors spread across the country, and years of accumulated media with no unified home.
When Ricardo Berry, Director of Enterprise Technology, started pulling on the thread of a storage problem, he found something much bigger underneath. This is the story of how Buildertrend went from 150+ terabytes of unprotected local drives and a $46,000/year DAM bill to a cloud-based, storage-agnostic media operation that finally works for everyone.
It started with a business continuity planning exercise. A team of analysts went department by department asking a simple question: if something stops working today, how do you keep going? When they got to the videography team, the answer was: they couldn't.
"They had these massive Thunder Bay drives—one around 80 terabytes, one around 120—and none of it was backed up," Ricardo explained. "That kind of sparked things."
But solving the backup problem meant looking at the whole picture. What Ricardo found was a creative organization running on disconnected systems and institutional workarounds.
The marketing team had a legacy file store with inconsistent VPN usage. And then there was their digital asset management system costing about $46,000 a year for just 100GB of storage, with no archival process in place. So the bill kept growing. There were videographers working off portable drives and USB sticks. And the corporate communications team—a separate department—had their own storage protocols, often storing assets directly on their laptops.
"They didn't even know about the other systems," Ricardo said.
That disconnection among teams and systems is an all too common problem as organizations scale fast and their media needs grow.
Ricardo had been prototyping solutions on his own—Azure storage with file sync, split-horizon DNS, NetApp, Synology—trying to find something that could give local network speeds to on-prem users while still being accessible remotely. Nothing quite fit.
Then, at a JAMF user conference in Nashville, he stopped at the Backblaze booth. (He'll admit it was partly for the free samples of hot sauce.) A conversation about his operational issues quickly shifted from cloud storage to something he hadn't heard of: Iconik.
A few weeks later, the conversation continued in earnest with the Iconik team. What sold Ricardo wasn't just the feature set—it was the architecture. Iconik's storage-agnostic approach meant he didn't have to choose one vendor and commit. The system could handle all of it.
In the first year of their operational revamp, the team invested in NAS hardware and used Iconik as the foundation for its media infrastructure. The team uses a working Backblaze B2 bucket for active marketing assets, an export bucket for sharing files with third parties, and a Google Cloud archive tier for anything no longer in active use. The cost difference between storage tiers is dramatic—and intentional.
Teams working remotely bypass the on-prem layer entirely, uploading directly to Iconik, where proxy files are generated and the content becomes immediately searchable and shareable.
The technical onboarding was, by Ricardo's estimate, about a 2 out of 10 on the difficulty scale. "Once you understand the concept of how the ISG works and get it flowing, it starts clicking," he said. "It's not hard."
The new system did require some internal coaching to help different teams—designers, marketers, a corporate communications group that had operated independently for years—understand why they were doing things differently.
Today, the organization is almost entirely off legacy systems. Designers, videographers, remote contractors, and corporate communications are all working from the same platform, with permission groups controlling what each team can see and access.The Adobe Premiere integration has been particularly useful for the videography team.
The headline number is $680,000 in projected three-year savings, driven primarily by the shift away from expensive cloud storage to tiered, storage-agnostic infrastructure—something that wouldn't have been possible without Iconik as the connective layer.
"One of the huge selling points is that it's storage-agnostic," Ricardo said. "Leveraging cheaper solutions like Backblaze and Google Cloud archival storage wouldn't have been possible without Iconik in the middle."
Buildertrend’s current active library sits at around 67GB in cloud working storage—well below the original estimate of 120KB, a sign that good archival hygiene is already taking hold. The library has 188,000 assets and growing.
For comparison: their legacy DAM was costing $46,000 a year for 100GB and no archival workflow. Year one of Iconik came in significantly lower, with costs dropping significantly in subsequent years as tiered storage does its job.
Beyond the cost story, Ricardo highlighted Iconik's AI capabilities as a meaningful part of daily operations—and a preview of where things are heading.
Facial recognition has been popular. "It's very similar to how Google Photos works," he said. "You tag a face once, and it recognizes that person every time they appear. That's been super helpful for dealing with the tagging debt we've accumulated over the years."
The team also regularly uses transcription for audio and video files, enabling search against spoken content—useful for tracking mentions of specific contractors, construction companies, or project names. Looking ahead, Ricardo is thinking bigger. "You can bring your own AI tool into Iconik," he noted. In this regard, Buildertrend is future proofed.
The ability to add a cold storage tier and not be locked in made a measurable financial difference. That flexibility only exists because Iconik doesn't care where your files live.
Years of untagged legacy content doesn't have to stay buried. Retroactive transcription and AI metadata tools make it possible to go back and make old assets searchable over time.
Year one looked good. Year two looked better. The further you get from legacy infrastructure, the cleaner the picture gets.
Interested in learning how Iconik can help your team get control of your media operations? Book a demo to talk through your specific situation.
