Stop pricing the next job on a hunch when you already know how the last one went.
You have priced work like this before. The estimate, the hours it actually took, the margin that was left at the end. All of it is sitting in old files. When the next scope lands, you should not be starting from a blank page. This brings your own history into the room so the estimate and the staffing plan are grounded in what really happened. A person still sets the price.
A prospect asks for a brand refresh with a tight timeline. It rhymes with three projects you have run before, but you cannot remember which.
You pull up the projects that most resemble this one, with their original estimates next to what they actually cost to deliver.
The margin signals show where past jobs like this drifted. The round of revisions you always underquote, the senior time you forgot to bill.
You set the price and the staffing yourself, now with your own record in front of you instead of a guess. You can still choose to bet against it.
Representative scenario. It shows how the pieces fit together, not something that happened. The projects, the timeline and the decision are illustrative. They are not a client result.
Three plain tools. One useful change.
Past Pricing
Every past estimate, kept and searchable.
Your old quotes stop being scattered across folders and inboxes. When a new scope arrives you can find the ones you have actually priced before.Similar Jobs
The new job set beside the ones it resembles.
Comparable past projects line up with their estimate and their actual delivery cost, so you can see where your original number held and where it did not.Underpriced Work
Where past work quietly lost money.
It flags the patterns in your own history, like the phases that ran long or the roles that got undercounted, so you can price the next one with your eyes open.The system prepares the work. A person still decides.
The system surfaces history and signals. It never sends a number, and it never sets a rate or a staffing plan on its own.
You can always see which past projects a signal is drawn from, so you can judge whether they really apply to the job in front of you.
Nothing is enforced. If you have a reason to quote differently from what the record suggests, you do, and the reason is yours to keep.
This reads your own past work; it does not learn a pricing model or optimize toward an outcome. Where an off-the-shelf tool already does the job, use that instead.
Effort and time first. Outcomes later.
Margin is a slow, directional read. It moves over many jobs, not one, so treat any single number with care. Estimate-versus-actual accuracy and the effort it takes to quote are the honest early signals; watch those first.
At the end of a project, someone closes the actual hours and margin against the original estimate. Miss it and the next estimate has no memory to draw on. The early warning you built has nothing left to warn you about.
See how the Lookout works