The problem
Photographer friends kept paying $40–50/month for HoneyBook and Dubsado. When I asked what they actually used, the answer was almost always the same: proposals. Maybe contracts.
The CRM, booking pages, and workflow automations? Untouched.
That felt like a real inefficiency. Not everyone needs a full business platform. Some people just need to send a professional proposal and get paid.
What I built
A completely self-contained HTML file. One file. You open it in any browser, fill in your details, click "export," and get a 3-page PDF proposal—cover page, packages & pricing, and terms with a signature field.
No server. No account. No data sent anywhere. Everything stays on your machine via localStorage.
Features that ended up mattering more than I expected:
- Logo upload — photographers care a lot about branding
- Drawn or typed signature—surprisingly, the canvas-drawn sig felt more "real" to users
- 7 currencies — because not every photographer is billing in USD
- Email template generator—the proposal itself is step 1; following up is step 2
- Greek version — I'm based in Greece, so I built a localized version with an embedded Greek font (FreeSans) for correct PDF rendering. Turns out very few tools bother with proper Greek typesetting.
The architecture decision I'm glad I made early
The biggest risk with canvas-based image handling is resolution loss. If you resize an image on the canvas and then export from that canvas, you lose quality. I side-stepped this by keeping resize as preview-only—all crop coordinates map back mathematically to the original pixel dimensions at export, always drawing from the original data URL. 300 DPI output stays
300 DPI.
What I haven't solved yet: distribution
The tool is live on Gumroad ($29 one-time). The code is done. The thing I'm genuinely uncertain about is whether freelancers will find it, trust it, and pay for it—when a "free Google Docs template" is always one search away.
If you're a freelancer who sends proposals, I'd love to give you a free copy in exchange for 20 minutes of honest feedback. Not a review, not a testimonial — just "this confused me" or "this is missing."
Drop a comment or reach out directly.
Live listing: athingeo.gumroad.com/l/proposal-builder
Top comments (1)
You're solving the downstream half of an offline workflow I care about. The gap I kept hitting was deciding whether a lead deserved proposal or demo work at all.
I turned that into six observable signals—conversation stage, credible budget, decision access, problem clarity, timeline, and asset readiness—with hard caps when authority or budget is missing. The free MIT browser tool is here: cloudycotton.github.io/demosprint-...
That suggests a clean sequence: qualify the opportunity, then generate the proposal. I built the qualifier and published the scoring logic, so this is not an independent endorsement.
For photographers, I wonder whether “event date/venue confirmed” should be a seventh signal. Does that show up often enough in your feedback to be structural?