About Plain Estimate

Plain Estimate is estimating and invoicing software for people who run a one person business. It is made by BrightScale Labs Limited, a small team that builds the software, writes the guides and answers the support email, so a question about how it works reaches someone who built it.

Why it exists

Invoicing software is a solved problem for a company with a bookkeeper. It is not solved at all for one person with a van, a camera or a set of tools, because almost everything built for them is priced and shaped for somebody larger. You are asked for a monthly subscription before you can send one invoice, an account before you can see whether the thing works, and a bank connection before it will do arithmetic that is addition and a percentage.

The other half of the problem is that the work does not happen at a desk. It happens in a loft, in a basement, in a van on a street with one bar of signal, at the moment the customer asks what it will come to. Software that needs the network at that moment is software that is not there when it is needed.

So Plain Estimate is built the other way round. Your work is written to your own device first and it stays readable whether or not anything of ours is reachable. There is no account until you want one, and you want one only when you need the same documents on a second device. Nothing is uploaded as a matter of course; it leaves your device when you publish a document to somebody, which is a thing you decide to do.

What we stand behind

Your documents are yours. They are stored on your device in a file you can export whole, at any time, without asking. Both formats are ordinary: a SQLite database anything can read, or an encrypted backup only your passphrase opens. There is no export that costs money and no format designed to make leaving difficult.

The arithmetic is checkable. Totals, tax and margin are worked in whole minor units rather than in floating point, which is the reason a long invoice adds up to the penny. What the app cannot know is your jurisdiction's rules, so it applies the rates you set and leaves the responsibility for them with you.

Nothing is sold on. Your clients' details are personal data belonging to your customers, not an asset of ours. They are not sold, not shared, and not used to train anything. Signed in, the fields that identify a person are encrypted before they are written to our database.

Getting in touch

The contact form reaches us directly, with or without an account. For anything to do with the company itself, the registered particulars and an address for legal and press enquiries are on the company page.