The basics · 5 min read
How do I send a quote and take a deposit?
The short answer
Get the budget before you price anything, put the quote somewhere with a number and a date rather than in the body of an email, and ask for the deposit at the moment they say yes. The order matters more than the format — most quotes die because they were written before anyone knew what the job was worth to the buyer.
On this page
If you sell work rather than products — a build, a shoot, a fit-out, a design job — the quote is where most of your unpaid time goes. You write it carefully, you send it, and a good share of them are never answered at all.
The format is rarely the problem. The sequence usually is.
Ask what it is worth to them before you price it
The most expensive habit in service work is pricing a job from a description. Somebody says "I need a website" and you spend an hour producing a number for a job whose shape you are guessing at.
The question that saves the hour is blunt and people answer it more often than you expect: what have you set aside for this?
It is not rude and it is not asking them to bid against themselves. It tells you whether you are talking about the same job at all — and a large share of the quotes that go unanswered were never for a job the buyer could afford. Finding that out before you write is the entire saving.
If they genuinely do not know, give a range for two or three shapes of the work and let them point at one. For web work specifically, we broke down what the ranges actually are, which makes that reply quicker to write. That is a five-minute reply, not an hour.
What a quote actually has to contain
Strip away the letterhead and it is four things:
- What is included, in the buyer's words rather than yours. Not "responsive implementation" — what they will be able to do that they cannot do now.
- What is not included. This is the one people leave out, and it is the one that prevents the argument in week six — the same clause that does the work in a written agreement.
- One number, or a small number of clearly separated ones. A quote with six line items invites a negotiation about line items.
- A date it expires. Not to pressure them — to stop a price from six months ago being held against you.
Everything else is decoration. A beautiful PDF that omits the exclusions is worse than a plain email that has them.
Send it somewhere it can be answered
An emailed quote sits in a thread and dies there. The buyer means to reply, something else happens, and after four days replying feels like an apology.
What works better is a quote that exists as its own thing and carries a state, so that saying yes is one action rather than composing a message — and so that you can see at a glance which ones are still open.
On Helm the nearest thing is the Project Requests module, and it is worth describing precisely rather than generally. A request arrives from your own site carrying a budget band, a timeline and any hard deadline, so you know what you are pricing against before you write a word. If your site has a price calculator, the estimate it showed them arrives with the brief. You mark it through new, reviewing, quoted, won and lost — which means the question what is still outstanding is a filter rather than a memory, and counting won against lost gives you your actual win rate without keeping a spreadsheet. And your site can take an optional deposit with the brief, through your own Stripe account, so the money goes to you rather than through us, and the request shows as paid when it lands.
Four honest caveats, because all of them would matter to you before you relied on it. Helm keeps the request and its status; it does not write or send the quote itself — that still goes out from you, the way you send it today. This is not on a plan you can just switch on yourself — it is enabled per client, so it is a conversation rather than a toggle. And the deposit is taken when the brief is sent, not when they accept a quote, and it needs your own Stripe account, which is a real setup step and not a five-minute one. It also needs a developer: the request only shows as paid once your site's own server tells Helm that Stripe took the money, and that piece is built for your site rather than switched on. What taking payments here actually involves is worth reading before you commit to it.
Ask for the deposit at yes, not after
The moment someone says "let's do it" is the only easy moment to ask for money. Every hour after that, the ask gets heavier, because it arrives as a separate event rather than as part of agreeing.
So the deposit belongs attached to the acceptance, not in a follow-up. Practically: the thing they accept should already say what the deposit is and how to pay it, so accepting and paying are one motion.
How much is a judgement, and the honest answer is that it depends on what walking away costs you. If the work needs materials or a booked day, cover that. If it does not, a deposit is mostly a filter for seriousness and can be small.
What to do with the ones that go quiet
One follow-up, about a week later, short, and with a genuine exit in it:
Still happy to do this if the timing works — if it has moved on, just say and I will close it off.
That last clause gets replies, because it makes "no" easy. A no you can hear is worth more than a maybe you carry around, and knowing lets you stop reserving the time.
Then stop. A third and fourth chase changes nothing except how you feel about the work.
If you are not there yet
If you only send a handful of quotes a month, none of this needs software. A document with those four things in it, a note of when you sent it, and a calendar reminder to follow up once will do everything described here.
The tooling earns its place when you can no longer remember which quotes are outstanding — and that is the same test as everything else: the system is worth it at the point where your memory stops being the record.