Many professions revolve around making sales, landing contracts and getting jobs, which makes quality proposals and quotes a necessity for a large number of people. Freelancers can certainly relate to the need of an easy, quality built app for creating great looking proposals and quotes.

We’ll take a look at a promising solution, QuoteRobot, which claims to do more than easily create nice looking proposals and quotes.

QuoteRobot Home

Overview

QuoteRobot is a simple and fresh app that touts multi-page quotes & proposals in moments with drag and drop simplicity and multiple output, notification and tracking options.

Features

Pricing

The pricing options are very limited, but, they do offer a free full 30 day trial. Should you decide the app fits your needs, you’re almost guaranteed to need the only paid plan at $12 per month since the Free plan only offers one quote per month.

Pricing

This is a pretty significant weak point for QuoteRobot, as potential subscribers are generally used to multiple pricing options. Though $12 per month isn’t expensive, not everyone will need unlimited quotes but will certainly need more than one per month. A “middle of the road” plan would be a good idea.

User Interface & Usability

After a very quick sign up, you’ll be able to jump directly into the app. Surprisingly, sign up doesn’t even require password verification — a typical sign up form staple. Once logged in you’ll be directed to your Dashboard and asked to enter a few details to get started.

Dashboard Welcome

I didn’t mind being required to enter a little account info. but I’m not particularly fond of being required to create a new client right off the bat. What if I don’t even have a client yet? Immediately after entering this information you’ll be taken to a new page to create a new quote. However, I chose to navigate back to the Dashboard to check things out a little more first.

Dashboard

The Dashboard now displays what will be the regular information. Overall, there really wasn’t much else to see before getting started creating my first quote. Onwards!

Creating a New Quote

You start by dragging one of four different page types onto the canvas. This seems a little strange because the page elements you drag onto the canvas seem quite oversized, using much more space than necessary to represent each portion of a quote.

Create Quote

As you drag the four page elements onto the canvas, new options will appear for you to begin working on your quote or proposal. Unfortunately, when viewing client & personal details, AJAX enhancements have not been implemented and you’ll be redirected if you attempt to edit client or personal details. This is an area that really needs AJAX functionality.

Quote Elements

Mid-progress you can click the large Save button to save your progress. Once you do, additional options will appear that allow you to copy, view, send or delete the quote. Once you’ve saved a quote, your Dashboard will now display your list of quotes.

Quote List

The Dashboard quote list will display quotes based on their status; draft, open, accepted or denied, each with a unique and vibrant color coding.

Editing & Sending Quotes

Click any of the listed quotes in your Dashboard and you’ll view its summary page with options to edit, view, update status, send to client, discuss and more.

Project Summary

Heading back to finish editing the quote, I’ve added the remaining two page elements covering timeline, payments, milestones, etc. While entering items in the quote page element I was given automatically generated options commonly used for related tasks, a nice feature.

Editing Quote

Quote PDF

Once I had created a very, very basic quote, I took a look at the resulting PDF that I’d send the potential client. Overall, I found it to be quite dry and lacking professionalism you’d likely expect from apps like Freshbooks. However, it does get the job done has has minimalism on its side.

Budget and Timeline Page

Final Thoughts

QuoteRobot is a very simple app for creating quotes and proposals, in which will be easy to quickly create and manage your quotes and proposals. I was definitely expecting more, but more isn’t always better. However, I think QuoteRobot does need more, even though it’s aiming at ultimate simplicity.

The overall interface, while not bad by any means, certainly needs a bit of revamping. My perspective of apps such as this is the interface and document output needs to exude a certain degree of professionalism at minimum, which QuoteRobot seems to be missing. The interface feels overly simplistic as if it were designed for a younger audience, likely not too interested in quotes and proposals.

The overall functionality of the app was pretty good but nothing at the level of powerful web apps being created for today’s market. QuoteRobot is certainly worth, at the very least, trying out and may just be what you’re looking for if you need something simple, quick and easy. I can’t say I could justify $12 per month for this app, though each individual’s needs may set a different price justification.

As a fresh app, QuoteRobot has potential but the app has some maturing and further developing to do before it will start taking on more serious market competitors.