Estipad: fast and easy project estimates

There are two things about software development effort estimation that are certain:

1. It’s hard.
2. It’s easier when the project is broken down into small tasks.

Estipad’s core is based on the latter. It lets you break down your project into small tasks.

What is professionally known as work breakdown structure, is simply a tree representation of your project. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Work breakdown structure of a project in Estipad

In Estipad, you only estimate the tasks that don’t have any children (the purple estimates in the screenshot); their ancestors’ estimates populate automatically.

That’s the core of Estipad. What else can you do with it?

Features

• Download a PDF estimate ready to send to a client
• Set your hourly rate and tax rate to calculate monetary estimates
• Add your business name and address to include on PDFs
• Manage clients; client name and address will be included on PDFs

Roadmap

I’d love to hear your feedback before I decide on the future of Estipad. However, some of the features I’d like to add are:

• Team plans
• Integration with project management tools
• Multiple PDF templates to choose from
• Custom PDF templates

For more insight into Estipad, including business and technical details, follow this publication.

In the next article, Launch post-mortem, I talk about how I launched Estipad and share the results from the first week.