What to Put in a Quote or Estimate (and What to Leave Out)

A quote is the shortest document you will send a client and the one most likely to be read twice. It is also the one where a missing sentence costs the most, because every sentence you left out becomes an argument in month three.

This is how to write one that survives being read by somebody who was not on the call.

First, decide which document you are writing

These three words get used interchangeably by everyone except the person who later has to honour them:

• A quote is a price you are committing to. If the work turns out to be twice the size, that is your problem unless the quote says otherwise.

• An estimate is a forecast. It carries a range, and it is only honest if it also carries the assumptions that put you at each end of the range.

• A proposal argues for the work. It contains a price, but the price is not what it is for. If you are still convincing them, you are writing a proposal.

The most common failure in this whole category is writing an estimate in your head and sending a quote on paper. You picture a range; the client reads a number; the number is the only thing either of you remembers.

What goes in, in this order

1. One line restating the job. In their words, from their brief, not yours. This is the sentence that proves you listened, and it is also the sentence that defines what the price is a price for.

2. The price. Near the top, not buried on the last screen. Everyone scrolls to it first; making them hunt reads as evasion.

3. What is included. Deliverables, in the noun form the client will use — “three page designs, in Figma, with a mobile layout for each” rather than “design phase”.

4. What is explicitly excluded. The section people skip. It is the most valuable one in the document. More on it below.

5. The assumptions the price depends on. “Copy supplied by you”, “one round of consolidated feedback”, “no migration of existing data”. Each assumption is a lever you can point at later without it being a confrontation.

6. What changes the price, and by how much. A day rate, a per-item rate, or a plain sentence: “Additional rounds of revision are charged at …”. Saying this before you need it is what makes charging for it feel routine instead of punitive.

7. How long it is valid. A date, not “30 days from issue”, so nobody has to work out which day you issued it.

8. How to accept. One instruction. Reply to this email, sign here, pay the deposit. A quote with no accept step is a document that ends in silence.

The exclusions section is the whole document

A client who reads only what is included will fill in the rest with whatever they hoped for. That is not bad faith; it is how anybody reads a list of features. Your job is to close the gaps while closing them is still free.

Write exclusions as flatly as you can bear. Not “this quote is limited in scope to …” but a short list of the specific things a reasonable person might assume were in there:

Not included: hosting and domain costs, photography, copywriting, translation into other languages, and any changes after sign-off on the final round.

Every item on that list is one you have argued about before. That is the correct method for writing the list: go through your last three projects and write down every moment somebody said “oh, I assumed that was part of it”.

A single number is not a quote, it is an ultimatum

Given one figure, a client has exactly two moves: accept or refuse. Given a shape, they have a conversation with you instead of one with themselves.

Two ways to give it shape without discounting:

• Split the price by deliverable. Not a costing breakdown that invites line-item haggling — three or four blocks that map to the things they asked for. Now a budget problem becomes “can we do it without the third block”, which is a question you can answer.

• Offer a smaller version that is genuinely smaller. A cheaper option must do less, not the same work with less care. If your lower tier is the same scope at a lower price, you have just told them your first number was invented.

If you are quoting a range, name what moves you inside it in the same breath: “£4,000 to £6,000 — nearer the lower end if the content is supplied in one batch, nearer the upper if we are writing it”. A range with no explanation is read as the lower number by the client and the upper number by you.

What to leave out

• Your company history, your values and your team biographies. Those belong in a proposal, and a client asking for a price has already decided you are plausible.

• A methodology diagram. Nobody has ever accepted a quote because of a five-step process wheel.

• Vague qualifiers — “approximately”, “circa”, “in the region of” — attached to a number you then treat as fixed. Pick a number and stand behind it, or state a range and explain it.

• Terms and conditions in full. Link to them. A quote that runs to nine screens stops being read at screen two, and the parts that mattered were on screen one anyway.

What a tracked quote actually tells you

Because a quote is short, the signal from it reads differently from the signal off a long document.

• A long first read of a short document. Two minutes on a one-screen quote is not two minutes of reading — it is somebody sitting with a number. That is the shape of price resistance, and it is the moment to offer the smaller version before they have decided against you.

• A second read, days later. Quotes get re-opened when they are being compared with somebody else’s, or shown to whoever controls the budget. What a second opening means goes through the shapes worth acting on.

• A reader who does not look like your recipient. On a quote this is nearly always finance. Nothing in the data ever says “forwarded” — here is what you can and cannot infer — but a new reader on a price document is the best news in the file.

One practical alignment worth making: if your quote expires on a date, put the same date on the link. Every share Quixli creates can be ended at any time, and depending on the kind of share a link can also carry an expiry date, a PIN and a cap on the number of views — the controls each kind of link supports are listed in full on the features page.

Once the price is agreed, the document that decides whether the project makes money is the one after this: how to write a statement of work. And when the engagement comes up for renewal, a renewal is priced differently from a first quote.