Plain Estimate

Estimates and invoices that live on your machine.

Plain Estimate runs in your browser and keeps your work in a vault on your own device. It opens with no signal, asks for no card, and only sends something somewhere when you tell it to. It works in nine languages, and so does the estimate or invoice your client receives.

Open the app See what it does
  • No sign-up
  • Nothing to install
  • Clients approve by link
  • 100 formats
  • 9 languages

What it does

Estimates that become invoices

Write an estimate, have it approved, turn it into an invoice without retyping a line. Convert the whole thing or bill it in milestones.

Line items with your real costs

Keep the cost beside the price and watch the margin as you type. What your client sees never includes either.

Approval links your client can sign

Publish a document as a link. They read it, sign their name, and you have a record of exactly what was agreed and when.

Six kinds of document

Estimates and invoices, and the four that go with them: pro forma invoices, credit notes, purchase orders and delivery notes. A delivery note carries no prices, because one that does is one somebody pays twice.

The ones that come round every month

Set a retainer or a maintenance charge to repeat, and it is waiting as a draft when it falls due. Away for three weeks? All three are there, not just the latest. Nothing is ever numbered or sent without you.

Payments and what is still owed

Record part payments against an invoice and see the balance, with the arithmetic done in whole pennies rather than floating point.

100 formats, one document

Pick how it looks. Plain, banded, letterhead, or a 72mm till roll, without retyping anything. The figures are the same in all of them.

What you billed, and what came in

Invoiced against received, month by month, and every unpaid invoice aged by how far past its due date it is. Chase one by email from the report that found it.

Your bank statement, matched

Export a statement from your bank as CSV and drop it on Expenses. Money in is matched to the invoice it settles; money out becomes expenses under the shop's name, with the category you chose last time. Nothing is written until you have seen every line, and the file never leaves your device.

The same client, entered twice

"Acme Ltd" and "ACME Limited", a phone typed two ways, one email under two names. Find duplicates puts them side by side, says why, and merges them into one. Every document, expense and schedule moves with them.

The app in your language

The whole app, and the estimate or invoice your client receives, in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish or Hindi. Pick one from the top bar; what you type stays in your own words.

A file, looked at properly

Load any CSV or JSON on the Data screen and it is a table: sort, filter, group, read every column in numbers, clean it with one-click steps you can keep as a recipe, query it with SQL beside your own records, and export the answer. All of it on your device, none of it kept.

100 formats, one document

The same figures every time. Pick the one that suits the job, or the client, and change your mind afterwards without retyping a line.

Classic
Apex
Titan
Letterhead
Element
Grid Card
Typewriter
POS / Thermal

8 of 100. The rest are in the app, with a picker that says what each one suits.

Why it is built this way

Your numbers stay yours

The prices you charge and the margins you work to are the most sensitive things in a small business. They sit in your browser, not in someone's database, and there is nothing to leak that we hold.

It works where the work is

Kitchens, lofts, sites and basements do not have signal. The app is stored on the device, so writing an estimate in one does not depend on a connection you have not got.

Gapless numbering, done properly

Numbers are assigned when a document is issued, in sequence, with no gaps, which is a legal requirement in several countries. Sign in and the sequence is handed out by the account, so two devices can never claim the same one.

A backup only you can open

Export the whole vault as one encrypted file. The passphrase never leaves your machine, which also means there is no reset: lose it and the file is unreadable, by us as well.

Free tools

The sums a one-person business does before an estimate and after an invoice, done once and done right, and blank documents that open straight into the app. None of them needs an account.

Hourly and day rateWhat to charge from what you need to earn and the hours you can actually bill. Margin and markupTwo words, two sums, and the price for the margin you want. Invoice due dateTerms into a date, and how many days late an invoice is today. Staged paymentsA deposit and stages that add up to the total exactly. Invoice generatorA numbered invoice as a PDF or a link, with your payment details on it. Estimate generatorAn estimate the customer can approve by name, that becomes the invoice.

All the tools

What people ask first

There is no account. Open it and start writing an estimate. Everything is kept in a private database inside your browser, on your machine, so your prices and your costs and your margins do not leave it unless you publish a document. Signing in, which puts the same work on a second device, is to be a paid plan at USD 24 a year; it is not available yet, and nothing else waits on it.

It works with the signal off. The whole app, including the database engine, is on your device after the first visit, so you can write and issue documents in a basement. Anything that genuinely needs the network, sending an email or publishing a link, waits until there is some.

The obvious risk of keeping work on your own machine is that clearing your browser data takes it with you. So the app exports an encrypted backup that only your passphrase opens, and it will remind you to take one. Signed in, there is also a copy on the server that comes back when you sign in again.

Any document can be published as a link. Your client opens it in any browser, reads it, and either signs their name to approve it or asks for changes. You see when it was opened and what was signed. Invoice numbers run sequentially with no gaps, assigned when a document is issued rather than when it is created, which several countries require and which means the drafts you abandon never burn a number.

Your bank statement goes in as a CSV from your bank, any bank: the file is read as it is, dates and decimals included. Money in is matched to the invoice it settles and money out becomes expenses, each line shown to you before anything is recorded, and a line already recorded is skipped, so the same statement twice changes nothing. Any other file, a price list, a customer list, last year's sales, can be loaded on the Data screen, cleaned up, queried with SQL beside your own records, and exported or sent to your clients or catalog. None of it is uploaded.

It works in your language. Choose from the top bar and the whole app, and the estimate or invoice your client receives, is in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish or Hindi. What you type, the item descriptions, notes and terms, stays in your own words. The dates and headings on the document are written the way that language writes them.

None of it costs anything. There is no card to enter and no feature that stops working after a trial.

Start writing one

Nothing to set up. The first estimate takes about a minute.

Open the app