About BidPaper

Why this exists

Almost every tool for trade paperwork has the same shape. It is free until it isn't: three documents a month, then a plan. It holds your estimates on its servers, so leaving means exporting what you can and losing what you can't. Increasingly it wants to process your payments too, and take a percentage of money you were perfectly capable of collecting yourself.

None of that is necessary to produce a good-looking estimate. A PDF is a document, not a service. The whole job — arithmetic, layout, fonts, export — can happen on the device in front of you, which is exactly what BidPaper does.

What that means in practice

• Your documents never leave your device. Estimates, invoices, clients and price books are stored in your browser. There is no upload, because there is nowhere to upload to.
• Nobody can lock you out. There is no account to suspend and no plan to expire into read-only. If this site disappeared tomorrow, the documents on your machine would still be yours.
• The free tier is uncapped. Unlimited estimates and invoices, permanently. A paid tier is planned; when it arrives it will unlock features — your logo and branded PDFs, good/better/best options, payment schedules, a terms library, encrypted backup — and never gates you on how many documents you make. Details at/pro/.
• No payment processing. Get paid however you already get paid. We print your terms; we don't take a cut.

What we can't do, by design

The privacy guarantee has a real cost and it is only fair to state it plainly. Because your documents are on your device and not on a server:

• Your work does not sync between your phone and your laptop.
• If you clear your browser data or lose the device, the documents go with it — which is why there's a one-click backup and why the app keeps reminding you to use it.
• We cannot recover anything for you. We genuinely cannot see it.

That trade is deliberate. Sync and recovery require custody of your records, and custody is the thing that makes lock-in possible in the first place.

How it's built

The parts that matter are the ones you can check. Money is computed in whole cents with a single documented rounding rule, verified by hand-worked reference cases and by property tests that generate thousands of random documents and assert the totals hold — you can read exactly how the math works. PDF output is deterministic, so re-exporting an unchanged estimate produces an identical file. The builder makes no network requests at all, which is asserted by a test that fails the build if anything tries.

Those are claims you can verify by using it with your network disabled. That is the intent: the promise should be checkable rather than taken on trust.

Who's behind it

BidPaper is an independent project, not a venture-funded company. Right now nothing funds it and nothing is for sale. The plan is ads on the guide and template pages — never inside the builder — and an optional Pro subscription for people who want branded documents, multi-option estimates and payment schedules.

That funding model is the reason the free tier can stay uncapped: it will not need to convert you to survive. If you have a question, a bug or a feature you need,get in touch.