Quote Robot is an app that I came across recently that seemingly streamlined the tedious task of writing proposals for lots of freelance designer’s out there. Intrigued, I signed up and have been giving the free trial a run for its uhh… money.
Essentially Quote Robot exists to:
Well, we’ve always found writing proposals to be a chore. I (Shawn) spent a lot of time creating a good proposal template in Illustrator, and it really worked, so I gave it away on my blog. I had no idea it would become the most popular article on my blog. I talked to Jon about writing an app to create the proposals, using my template, and we both thought it would help us out, so we did it. The longest part of quoting for me were always, a) coming up with the numbers (what to charge), and b) building the proposal in Illustrator. We decided to focus on trimming the time to accomplish those things. !
I have decided to split this into four sections: Interface, Making A Proposal, Output and Pricing
The interface
Quote Robot is a very cool, slick web application and it follows all the design trends one would expect from a web 2.0 application. More than just superficially looking the part, things are easy to find and the usability of the site as a whole is intuitive and for the most part simple stupid. These are good things, considering the application’s entire purpose is to streamline and decrease the time writing proposal’s takes. The application guides you through making the proposal fairly quickly and efficiently. There are a few superfluous drag and drop features which don’t seem to really make anything faster, but hey they look nice right.
Making A Proposal
The options it presents are the core of any proposal: client / company information, the scope, budgeting and timescale and quote summary. Each field gets to the core of the information that needs to be handed to a client. Their claim of it being a quick and easy process is definitely true, minimising clicking into new text boxes, formatting titles and all the tiny little tasks that eat up time in InDesign / Illustrator are done away with. I was done filling out the various bits of information for the proposal in less than 10mins.
Output
The template generated is a neat and tidy PDF that looks clean and modern. You can upload your own logo, so it is completely white labelled and looks like a PDF you have made the long and hard way in another desktop program. You can download the PDF so that you can attach it to an email or alternatively send it straight away to the client from the application itself.
Pricing
The easiest way to review the pricing is $24 a month and this gets you ‘unlimited’ everything that Quote Robot offers. Simply analysed, the SMALLEST job of lets say one billable hour – is more than the $24 charge. If you use the application to send one proposal a month, your fee is covered and the time you save can be used to do other projects or just sit back and have a coffee.
At Acuity, it’s something we will definitely be making use of!
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