The Quote Presentation Kit

The same price is accepted when it is presented one way and argued over when it is presented another. That much is not controversial. What is unusual about this tool is that it tells you how much is actually known about each of the ways.

It builds a three-option quote round the price you want, with that price in the middle and margins on all three so a cheap tier cannot quietly be below your own cost. It scores the quote you currently send against ten things a reader can either see or not see. And it says the same total four ways — as a total, per month, per week and per day — while warning you that the per-day version is only honest when the work genuinely lasts that long.

The table at the bottom is the part nobody else will print. Three options with yours in the middle: repeatedly demonstrated in choice experiments, though nobody has measured the size of it in a trades quote, so treat it as a sensible structure rather than a lever with a number on it. Saying the dearest first: one of the better-supported findings in negotiation research, and weaker with experienced buyers. Itemising the total: genuinely contested, and worth doing because it prevents arguments about scope rather than because it sells.

And one technique is named as poorly supported for this kind of work and then deliberately left out of the tool rather than quietly included anyway. Prices ending in ninety-nine are well evidenced for supermarket goods and weakly or not at all for services, so no price this produces is charm-priced.

Every item on the checklist is about the quote and none of them is about the reader. That is deliberate. What your quote says is entirely yours to control; what somebody does when they read it is not, and any tool that claims otherwise is selling you a number it does not have.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all.

Written by an I/O psychologist, which is the reason the evidence table exists at all. There is no conversion rate quoted anywhere in it, because nobody honestly has one for your trade — and a tool that made one up would be easier to sell and worth considerably less.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.