A quoting app for tradespeople — speak it, check it, send it

Q: Does the AI send anything to my customer?

No. When you speak a quote, the AI writes it up into editable fields and a draft reply — and stops. You see the price, the description and the message before anything moves, and nothing is sent until you press send. A misheard number costs you one glance, never a wrong quote.

Q: Can I take a deposit on a quote?

Yes. Once a quote is accepted you can request the full amount or a deposit — a quarter, half, or anything you type — through your own Stripe account. The payment link drops into the conversation, and when the customer pays, the quote marks itself paid. The balance stays visible until it's settled.

Q: What about VAT — or GST, or sales tax?

A quote can say the price is plus VAT, includes VAT, or say nothing — your choice, shown plainly beside the figure so nobody is surprised at payment time. The word itself follows your currency: VAT for the UK and most of the world, GST for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and Singapore, sales tax for the US. You can speak it, too — "that's plus VAT" sets it.

The quote that gets written at nine at night

Most quotes are a person who knows exactly what the job costs, telling another person the number. The skill is in the pricing, and the pricing is already done — it happened on the doorstep, or on the phone, or the moment the brief or the photos came through on WhatsApp. And that person is as likely to be a photographer, a designer, a caterer or a tutor as a plumber — anyone whose work runs quote, yes, get paid.

What stands between that number and the customer is the writing-up: sit down, open something, type the price, type what it covers, get the wording right, send it. On a phone, between jobs, with your hands full — it waits. And a quote that waits is a customer who’s meanwhile heard back from someone else.

The pricing takes seconds. The typing is what takes until Thursday — and the typing is the part software can carry.

Say it. Check it. Send it.

In Vidual Inbox, a quote rides along with an ordinary reply — and now you can speak the whole thing. We call it Speak-to-Quote. Tap the mic and say it the way you’d say it to a mate:

“£150 for the car valet, ref 74, plus VAT — hi Pete, here’s that quote we talked about. Any questions, give me a ring.”

What comes back isn’t a transcript. The words are interpreted: the figure lands in the amount field — say “two hundred for the parts and one-fifty labour” and it lands as £350 — the job becomes a clean customer-facing line, your reference is caught if you gave one, the VAT stance is set if you said one, and everything you said after the numbers becomes the drafted message, in your own words with the “um”s gone.

Then it stops. Every field sits there, editable, and the reply is a draft. Nothing reaches your customer until you press send. A misheard number costs one glance, never a wrong quote.

There’s a lot of noise just now about what AI is actually for — and whether it’s coming for all of it. Our view is smaller. AI is at its most useful when it takes a chore you’d gladly hand over and gives you the minutes back, so you can stay on the part of the job that was always yours. Here, the typing is the chore. The pricing, the judgement and the customer are still all you.

What the customer receives

On email, the quote arrives as a small letterhead inside your reply: what the job is, the figure beneath it, the date and your reference in quiet type, a thin rule in your brand’s colour. No logo banner, no “powered by” badge, no document attached — it reads like a personal note from a business that has its act together, because that’s what it is.

On Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram or live chat, it’s a short clean block in the thread — because that’s what those channels natively are, and a PDF in a DM helps nobody.

If you told us where VAT stands, the customer sees it beside the figure — £450 plus VAT or £450 including VAT — so nobody meets a surprise at payment time. And the word itself follows the money: a US business says sales tax, an Australian one says GST, most of the world says VAT.

Then the money, in the same thread

A quote in Vidual Inbox isn’t a dead-end document — it’s a live thing in the conversation where the work is being arranged:

Accepted in one tap. The customer says yes, you tap Accepted, and Inbox offers to take payment there and then.
Deposits, if you want them. Request the full amount or a deposit — a quarter, half, or any figure you type — through your own Stripe account. The payment link drops into your reply; when it’s paid, the quote marks itself paid, and a part-payment keeps the balance visible until it’s settled.
Nothing goes quiet unnoticed. A quote that’s had no answer surfaces in your Up Ahead briefing on its own — the follow-up nobody has to remember.
Your reference works everywhere. A customer rings about “job 74”; type it in search and the thread surfaces, whatever channel it lives on.

And because the quote lives in a shared inbox, it isn’t stranded on your phone. Whoever picks up the conversation next sees the quote, its status, and what’s been paid — the record made itself while you were talking.

And if a job genuinely calls for a document — line items, terms for legal, signatures — that’s proposal software’s craft, and tools like Qwilr and PandaDoc do it well. The quotes we’re built for are the other kind, which is most of them: one price, one job, one person deciding. For those, the reply is the quote — and the fastest way to write it is to say it.

Common questions

Is this a quoting app, an invoicing tool, or proposal software?
None of the three, quite. Vidual Inbox is a shared inbox where a reply can carry a quote: a price, a line saying what it’s for, your own reference, and where VAT stands. It keeps to what small jobs need — for a deal that wants line items, a document and signatures, proposal software is the right craft. For the £150 jobs that make up most small-business quoting, the reply is the quote.

Does the AI send anything to my customer?
No. Speaking a quote fills editable fields and drafts a reply — and stops. Nothing moves until you press send. This is the same line we hold everywhere in the product: AI can do the typing, and a person does the talking.

Can I take a deposit on a quote?
Yes — full amount or a deposit, through your own Stripe account, with the link dropped into the conversation. When the customer pays, the quote marks itself paid; a part-payment keeps the balance visible.

What does quoting cost?
Nothing on top. Quotes, spoken quotes, payment requests and every channel are part of the one plan — £34.99 a month flat, plus VAT, for your whole team. Payments run through your own Stripe, so Stripe’s standard processing fees apply to those.

What about VAT — or GST, or sales tax?
A quote can say the price is plus VAT, includes it, or say nothing — shown plainly beside the figure either way. The word follows your currency: VAT for the UK and most of the world, GST for the GST countries, sales tax for the US. You can speak it too — “that’s plus VAT” sets it.

Try saying one

The quickest way to feel it is to do it once: connect your inbox, open any conversation, type a price in a reply — or just tap the mic and say the whole thing. Start a 14-day trial — no card needed — or book a demo with Pete and say one down the phone.

Vidual Inbox is available now at vidualinbox.com. 14-day free trial, no credit card required. £34.99/month after that, every feature, every team member.