QuoteBuild Review UK 2026: Quoting and Job Costing Tested on a Bathroom Refit
This QuoteBuild review is based on a hands-on test, not the sales page. We pasted the rough notes for a bathroom refit into QuoteBuild, let it build the estimate, turned that into a client quote, then logged a supplier bill against the job to see how the cost tracking reacts. QuoteBuild is a sharp, cheap quoting and job costing tool for UK builders, and its notes-to-estimate feature got every line right. Watch the default markup, though, and do not expect CIS, card payments or accounts software links.
Some links on this page are affiliate links, we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you.
What Is QuoteBuild?
QuoteBuild is UK quoting and job costing software for small builders and trades. You build an estimate from your own costs, add your profit, and send a branded quote pack the client can accept online. Once the job is won, the accepted quote becomes the job budget, and you log bills and labour against it to see where the margin is going. It runs in the browser, and it is made by a small UK company (Strawberry Works Limited) rather than one of the big job management brands.
It is not a full job management app. We did not see staff scheduling or timesheets, QuoteBuild says it does not collect payments for you, and the team plan (with plan take-off and project management) is still marked “planned” on the pricing page.
QuoteBuild Pricing (checked 15 November 2026)
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free trial | £0 for 14 days or 10 quote PDFs | Whichever limit comes first, no card needed |
| Pro (founding offer) | £15/month or £150/year | Unlimited quotes, online acceptance, job costs, variations and margin tracking. QuoteBuild says the founding price is for life, while it is available |
| Pro (standard) | £25/month | The same, for new subscriptions once the founding offer ends |
| Control | £100/month (planned) | Not on sale yet: 3 seats, take-off from plans, programme and site records |
At £15 a month, QuoteBuild is one of the cheapest quoting tools we have looked at. It is about half the price of Trame (£29), but Trame also does invoicing with CIS and card payments, so they are not like for like.
What We Tested
Notes to estimate
Pasted 11 lines of rough notes for a bathroom refit, written the way you would on WhatsApp, with ten priced items worth £4,850.
Markup and pricing
Checked the default profit, contingency and VAT settings and worked out the client price by hand.
The client quote
Turned the estimate into a quote and checked the risk scan, the layout options and the schedule of works.
Job cost tracking
Logged a £1,900 tiling bill against a £1,544 tiling budget to see whether it warns you.
How the Notes to Estimate Feature Held Up
Very well. QuoteBuild found 10 priced lines, skipped our heading line, and got every quantity and rate right: 1.5 days of first fix at £280 a day came out as £420, 22 m² of wall tiling at £32 as £704, and so on. The total was exactly the £4,850 we expected. Each draft line shows the text it came from and a confidence label, and nothing is added to the estimate until you click to apply it.
It is not perfect at sorting lines into trades. It filed the strip-out under Tiling and the electrician under Electrics materials rather than as a subcontractor. That matters more than it sounds, as you will see in the schedule below. It also ignored the client’s name and address at the top of our notes, so the quote came out for “Client TBC” until we would have filled it in.
Watch the Default Markup
This is the one thing to check before you trust the price. QuoteBuild treats the prices you paste as your costs, then adds its default profit on top: 35% on materials, 40% on labour and a 5% contingency. Our £4,850 of notes became a client price of £6,992.68 before VAT, about 44% more. We checked the sum by hand and it is right (£2,346 of materials and the £260 skip at 35%, £2,244 of labour at 40%, then 5% on top).
That is fine if your notes are your costs. But QuoteBuild’s own example invites you to paste “an old quote”, and an old quote is already at your selling price. Paste one of those without changing the pricing controls and you will quote the next customer far too high. The settings are one click away under Pricing controls, so this is easy to fix once you know. Not sure what your own labour should be? Our day rate checker compares your rate with UK benchmarks.
How the Client Quote Held Up
The quote screen is the best part of QuoteBuild. Before you can download the PDF it runs a quote risk scan (ours scored 64/100) that flagged the missing client email, the missing logo and £2,606 of materials priced by hand rather than from its cost library. Under that is a missing-costs checklist: it saw we had allowed for a skip, and asked us to check access, floor protection, making good, certificates and more. These are exactly the small items that eat a builder’s margin, and none of the other quoting tools we have tested has a checklist like it. You also have to tick “I have reviewed this quote” before the download button works.
You can show the client a priced schedule, a trade summary or a full bill of quantities, and add Good, Better and Best options and payment stages. Your costs and markup stay hidden from the client.
The automatic schedule of works was less convincing. Because the strip-out was filed under Tiling, tiling appeared in the strip-out week, and the wall boarding and the new suite were scheduled for week 5, after the tiling and second fix plumbing. QuoteBuild labels it “indicative only”, and you can change it, but do not send it to a client without reading it.
How the Job Cost Tracking Held Up
When the job starts, the estimate becomes the live budget, trade by trade. We logged a £1,900 tiling bill (marked unpaid, with a due date option and room for a receipt photo) against the £1,544 tiling budget. QuoteBuild immediately flagged Tiling as “Action needed”, £356 over and 123% used, which is exactly the warning you want.
Two things to know. Because we logged the bill against the trade rather than a single quote line, it showed up as “extra spend” not matched to a line. And the headline projected profit at the top stayed at £2,143, “within cost budget”, because QuoteBuild only lowers the projection once total spending passes the total estimate. It says so on the screen, but a glance at the headline alone would not tell you tiling had already eaten into your margin.
What we found wrong
- Default markup on pasted prices: notes are treated as costs and get 35 to 40% profit plus 5% contingency added, which can badly inflate an old quote.
- Trade sorting: the strip-out was filed under Tiling and the electrician as materials, which put the schedule of works in the wrong order.
- Client details ignored: the name and address in our notes did not carry over to the quote.
- Headline profit: it did not drop when one trade went over budget.
- Gaps: no CIS deductions, no card payments and no Xero or QuickBooks connection that we could find.
Who Is QuoteBuild Best Suited To?
QuoteBuild vs Trame vs Sleepless Tradesman
All three are newer UK quoting tools, and each does one thing best. QuoteBuild is the strongest on pricing the job and protecting the margin: the risk scan, missing-costs checklist and job cost tracking are ahead of both, and it is the cheapest. Trame (£29 a month) is stronger once the quote is accepted, with automatic deposit invoices, CIS, the reverse charge and card payments. Sleepless Tradesman writes the whole quote for you from a description, but you can only edit it by chatting with the AI. For the wider picture, see our best quoting software for UK tradespeople.
QuoteBuild FAQs
How much does QuoteBuild cost?
QuoteBuild Pro is £15 a month or £150 a year on the founding offer, which QuoteBuild says is locked in for life for early subscribers while it lasts. The standard price after that is £25 a month. The free trial runs for 14 days or 10 quote PDFs, whichever comes first, with no card needed.
Can QuoteBuild turn my notes into a quote?
Yes. Paste rough notes or an old quote and it turns each priced line into an editable estimate line. In our test it read all 10 lines of a bathroom job correctly. It treats the prices you paste as your costs, though, and adds its default profit on top, so check the pricing controls first.
Does QuoteBuild do CIS or connect to Xero?
We did not find CIS deductions in the app, and QuoteBuild does not list a Xero or QuickBooks connection. It is a quoting and job costing tool, so you would still need separate software for CIS invoices and your accounts.
14 days or 10 quote PDFs, no card needed. Paste the notes for a job you have already priced and compare its figure with yours, after checking the pricing controls.
Verdict: Is QuoteBuild Worth It?
For a small builder who prices real jobs, yes, on the founding price. Turning rough notes into a correct estimate took seconds, the quote risk scan and missing-costs checklist are genuinely useful, and the job tracker flagged our overspend straight away. It loses points for a default markup that can catch you out, trade sorting that scrambles the schedule, and a headline profit figure that is slow to react. It is a quoting and costing tool, not a full job management app, so subcontractors who need CIS invoices or card payments will need something else alongside it. At £15 a month, it is worth a free trial for any builder who quotes from notes or spreadsheets.
This review is based on our own hands-on test on 15 November 2026, using a test job and a made-up customer with no contact details. No quote was sent to anyone. QuoteBuild’s founder contacted us about the product and gave us free access to test it, but did not see or approve this review before publication. We earn a commission if you subscribe through our link. Neither changed what we found. See how we test and check.