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Proposals

Proposals let you build a quote for your work, share it with the client as a private link, and track what they do with it. When a client accepts, the linked opportunity moves to Won.

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Creating a proposal

Navigate to Proposals and click New Proposal. The proposal editor is organized into sections you can fill out in any order: Proposals auto-save as you work, so you won’t lose progress.

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Deliverables

A deliverable is what the client actually ends up holding. Each one takes a name and an optional description, plus four optional fields that describe the product itself: These fields are worth filling in because “a map” is not one product. An orthomosaic at 2 cm/px and one at 5 cm/px are different jobs at different prices, and your client cannot tell which one they bought from the word “map”. Writing GeoTIFF · 2 cm/px · within 5 working days of acceptance on the proposal settles that question before anyone signs, not after. Delivery time is always counted from acceptance, never as a calendar date. A date you type while drafting is already wrong by the time the client gets round to answering. Every field is optional. Deliverables you wrote before these fields existed keep working exactly as they did, and a deliverable with only a name still reads fine.

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Services and pricing

The Services & Pricing block is where the money on a proposal is decided.

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Line items

Add services from your price list. Each line carries the service name, description, quantity, and price, and every one of them can be edited on the proposal without touching the catalog entry behind it. A line can also be:
  • Discounted — a percentage or a fixed amount off the subtotal.
  • Taxed — a percentage or a fixed amount, applied after the discount.
  • An optional add-on — quoted, but not charged unless the client ticks it. See Optional add-ons.
The total is worked out as: line items → discount → tax.
There are no automatic surcharges. Nothing is added to a quote for controlled airspace, marginal weather, a rush job, or a long drive — if you want to charge for one, add a line for it.

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Travel

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Travel is not added automatically either. The Site tab measures the distance from your business address to the site, and you decide whether to put it in the price — see Using the trip distance in your price.

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The Site tab

A proposal has three views, switched at the top of the page: Compose, Site and Analytics. Site is about the place the work happens, and what it costs you to get there. It needs a work location with coordinates. Set one under Settings → Organization — pick the address from the suggestions so the pin is saved with it. The footprint is ground area, not a roof measurement, and it is not written into the quote. Empty means the building is not mapped, not that nothing is there.

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Using the trip distance in your price

The trip figure is a straight line, one way. A real drive is always longer, so treat it as a floor. To put it into a quote, open Analytics → Trip to site and choose Use N mi from business address. That fills the distance box, and travel cost is recalculated from the round trip. Nothing is applied until you do this — the number is a suggestion, not a change to your price. The distance is measured from your business address, set under Settings → Organization. Without one, the Trip section does not appear.

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Proposal lifecycle

Proposals move through a defined set of statuses:
1

Draft

You’re building the proposal. All sections are editable. The proposal is not visible to the client yet.
2

Published

The client link answers, and the proposal is locked for editing. To make changes, unpublish it first.
3

Accepted

The client accepted. The linked opportunity moves to Won on its own. That is the end of the loop in the product.
4

Declined

The client declined. The linked opportunity moves to Lost. You can still view the proposal, and you can reopen it as a draft to revise and publish a new version.
5

Withdrawn

You took the proposal off the table. The link stops answering. You can republish it later, unchanged.
Only Draft proposals can be edited. To change a published proposal, unpublish it, make your edits, then publish again.

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The publish check

Clicking Publish on a draft opens a short check first. It does not show you the proposal again — that is already on screen behind it. It shows the three things you cannot see while writing:
  • What the client pays, and what you keep. The two figures side by side, with your margin. Below them, a bar shows your hourly rate on this job against the target rate you set in Pricing — the bar fills to the target, so a short bar means a short price. If you are under, one line tells you what to quote instead. This is the figure that gets locked in: once published, the totals your client saw are stored and never recalculated.
  • What the client will notice is missing. Sections a client would expect — your introduction, the scope of work, what they receive — plus a warning if the proposal has no expiry date or one that has already passed. Each is a chip you can click to jump straight to it; hover one to see why it matters. These are advice, not blockers: you can publish over any of them.
  • What happens next. Publishing makes the client link start answering. It emails nobody, and until you choose recipients, nobody can open it.
If something genuinely required is missing — a client name, an email, a title, or at least one service — it appears under Add first and Publish stays disabled until you add it.

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Changing the status

The status is shown as a label, not a dropdown — it records what has happened. What you can do next is always the button in the page header plus the ⋯ menu beside it, and only legal steps are offered: Mark as accepted and Mark as declined are for answers you got somewhere else — a phone call, a reply in your inbox. They are logged as recorded by you, not as the client’s own answer, so the record stays honest about who did what. An accepted proposal is the end of the line: there is nothing after it to move into.

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Sharing with clients

When you publish a proposal, dronelist generates a private link you can send to your client. It looks like https://app.dronelist.io/p/a7f3k2mq9xz1.

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Sending it

Publishing makes the link work — it does not email anyone. To send it, click Send to client in the page header; once you have sent it at least once, the same button reads Send again. The dialog opens on its own right after you publish, so you don’t have to go looking for it. dronelist pre-fills the subject and a short message; edit them however you like. The link is added below your message automatically, so you can’t accidentally delete it. Who it comes from:
  • If you’ve connected Gmail or Outlook in Settings → Integrations, the email is sent from your own address. Your client can just hit reply. With more than one account connected, pick which one in the From row.
  • If you haven’t connected an account, it goes out from dronelist instead, with replies pointed back at your address. Connecting your own mailbox is better — clients trust a message from you more than one from a tool they’ve never heard of.
Everyone you put in To or Cc is automatically allowed through the proposal’s gate, so a colleague you copy in can open it too. Each of them gets their own code at their own address — they don’t share one. The Client link row lists every address that can open the proposal, so you can always see who you’ve let in. Reopening the send dialog pre-fills all of them, so Send again goes to the same people rather than quietly dropping the colleague you copied in last time. Once sent, the header button changes to Send again and the date appears in the client-link tooltip. The send is also recorded in the proposal’s Activity, and on the opportunity’s timeline when the proposal is linked to one.
If your email account was connected before sending was supported, it can only read mail. dronelist will tell you, with a link to reconnect it — that takes a few seconds and grants send permission.
Open the proposal. The bar above the document holds the preview button, which opens the page exactly as your client sees it. Published proposals show a second button next to it that copies the client link — hover it to see which addresses can open it and when it was last emailed. The same link is under the ⋯ menu as Copy client link.
Copy client link and Copy internal link are not the same. The internal link is the proposal’s address inside your workspace — anyone opening it is asked to sign in to dronelist. Always send your client the client link, the one starting /p/.
While a proposal is still a Draft, there is no client link yet — publish it first. If you revoke access or withdraw the proposal, the link stops working and the row says so.

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Previewing it yourself

You never need a code to read your own proposal. As long as you are signed in to dronelist, the preview button opens it straight away — you are recognised by your account, not by your email address, so there is nothing to copy and nothing to remember. The preview shows a bar across the top telling you three things: that this is your view and not a client’s, whether the client link answers yet, and that your visit is not counted as a client view. That last point matters — the Viewed signal on a proposal should only ever mean your client opened it, so your own reads never touch it. This works on drafts too, which is when it is most useful: you can read the whole document as your client will get it before you publish anything. It also keeps working after you withdraw a proposal or revoke access, so you can still check what was sent.
Preview is for you and anyone in your workspace. It is not something you can hand to a client — your client always goes through the email code below.

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How your client gets in

The link on its own is not enough to open the proposal. Your client also has to prove they control an email address you allowed:
  1. They open the link and see who the proposal is from.
  2. They enter their email address.
  3. If that address is on the proposal, we email them a 6-digit code.
  4. They enter the code, and the proposal opens.
The code expires after 10 minutes and can only be used once. After entering it, your client stays signed in to that one proposal for 7 days, on that device.
The gate gives the same answer to every address, whether or not it is on the proposal. This is deliberate: it stops anyone who gets hold of the link from using it to discover your client’s email address.

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Who can open it

By default, only the client email on the proposal. Clients often forward a proposal to a colleague or to procurement, and those people will hit the gate — so if you know someone else needs to read it, add their address to the proposal as well. You can switch a proposal off at any time by revoking access. Anyone opening the link afterwards sees a message telling them to contact you.

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What your client sees

Not a PDF. Your client gets a page built for reading on a phone, with:
  • Your name, photo, and headline at the top
  • The proposal title, who it is for, the total, and how long the price holds
  • Your introduction, the scope of work with every line item, and what they receive — each deliverable with its format, quality, count and delivery time
  • About your operator — your flight hours, years flying, insurance cover, and credentials
  • Your terms, collapsed until they want them
  • A bar that stays on screen with the total and their decision
That operator section is the part a PDF cannot do. “Are you licensed and insured?” is usually the first question a client has, and this answers it from your real records before they have to ask.

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Optional add-ons

Any service line can be marked an optional add-on. Open the line in Services & Pricing and turn on Optional add-on. An add-on is quoted but not charged unless the client picks it:
  • It is not in the proposal total. The total you send is the least the client can pay.
  • On the proposal page it appears in its own Optional add-ons block, unticked, with its price shown as +£250.
  • Ticking a box updates the total straight away, including tax and any percentage discount.
  • When the client accepts, we record what they actually agreed to pay and which add-ons they chose. Your proposal’s own total is left untouched — it stays the record of what you sent.
You will see the outcome in the sidebar’s Details tab: Accepted for is the real figure, and Add-ons chosen names what they took. If the two totals differ, the difference is add-ons.
An add-on is something extra on top of the job — a thermal pass, rush processing, an extra site visit. It is not a way to offer “Basic or Premium”. If you need the client to choose between alternatives, send the version you recommend; dronelist deliberately has no good/better/best packages.

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Their decision

From the same page, your client can:
  • Accept the proposal with an optional message
  • Decline the proposal with an optional message
  • Ask a question to start a conversation before deciding
Because they came through the gate, an acceptance is tied to a verified email address, with the date and time recorded. You are not relying on “somebody with the link clicked accept.” Once they have answered, the proposal page shows them which address the response was recorded against and when — so a colleague opening the forwarded link can see who already replied. If the validity date has passed, the proposal is still readable but the decision buttons are gone, and your client is asked to contact you for an updated quote.

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Your proof of acceptance

Open the proposal and check the sidebar’s Details tab. Two panels appear once there is something to show: Acceptance — the answer, the verified address that gave it, the date, and any message they left. Two supporting details are recorded as well: an IP fingerprint (a one-way hash, enough to corroborate, not enough to track anyone) and the browser the response came from. If you changed the status yourself instead of the client answering, the panel says Recorded by you rather than claiming a client acted. Read history — how many times the proposal was opened, by how many different people, when it was last opened, and how long they spent reading. This is the signal an emailed PDF can never give you: a proposal opened four times and still unanswered is a follow-up call, not a lost deal. Both panels are yours alone. Your client never sees the read history, the IP fingerprint, or the browser details — including when several people are authorised on the same proposal.
A proposal and an opportunity update each other:
  1. Link them. When you create a proposal, attach it to an existing opportunity. That opportunity’s Proposals tab then lists it.
  2. The answer moves the stage. When a client accepts, the opportunity moves to Won; when they decline, it moves to Lost. You never have to update it by hand.

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After the job

Once a proposal is accepted, two things are still open to you:
  • Mark the job done. Available on every plan.
  • Record the hours it took. On Pro. Enter what the job really cost you in time and see the hourly rate it actually earned beside the one you quoted. That figure feeds Pricing, the client’s own record, and the monthly money review.

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Tips

Proposal lines come from your services, and the margin on the publish check comes from your rates. Setting both up first makes every proposal after it faster and more honest.
It is the only place that shows you what you keep, next to what the client pays, before the numbers are locked in.
“Are you licensed and insured?” is usually a client’s first question. The operator section on the proposal answers it from your real records before they have to ask.
Anyone not on the proposal hits the email gate when the link is forwarded to them. If you know procurement will read it, add them now.
An add-on is something extra on top of the job. If you want the client to choose between two versions, send the one you recommend.
Last modified on September 7, 2026