What should a freelance design proposal template include?

A restatement of the client's situation, the scope with its exclusions, the deliverables with quantities and formats, the assumptions you priced against, dates, the price as options, the terms, and one action to accept. The two lines most templates omit are the assumptions and the expiry date, and both exist to protect you from the passage of time rather than from the client.

Is this proposal template really free?

Yes, and the reason it is worth saying is that most of them are not. The standard arrangement in this category is a form, an email address, and a sequence of marketing messages afterwards, which prices a Word document at your inbox. Copy the text below, or take the fill-in version — no form either way.

Can I use this template for a fixed-price project?

It is built for one. The options block assumes fixed prices per tier, and the assumptions list is what keeps a fixed price safe — every fixed-price disaster starts with something you took for granted and never wrote down. For open-ended or exploratory work a day rate suits better, and the template still works if you replace the options block with a rate and an estimated range of days.

How long should a design proposal be?

The filled-in version of this runs to about two pages, and that is a reasonable ceiling for a mid-sized project. Length in a proposal reads as uncertainty to anyone senior enough to sign one, and the sections people add to reach a respectable page count — process diagrams, studio history, logo walls — are the ones buyers skip on the way to the price.

Freelance design proposal template (free, no email required)

Here is the whole thing. No form, no email address, nothing behind a gate. Copy it out of the page.

The reason to say that is that this category has a habit: publish a template, put it behind an email capture, then charge the reader in follow-up sequences for the privilege of a document that took an hour to write. Give the thing away whole or do not publish it.

The template

PROPOSAL — [Project name]
Prepared for [Client name] · [Date] · Valid until [Date + 30 days]

YOUR SITUATION
[Two or three sentences, in their words, from the call. What is happening,
what is prompting it now, and what needs to be true afterwards. No
introduction of yourself above this. Nothing about your studio yet.]

WHAT THIS INCLUDES
[Deliverables as countable objects with quantities and formats:]
  · [e.g. Primary wordmark plus one stacked lockup, supplied as vector files]
  · [e.g. Colour and type system, with a six-page usage sheet]
  · [e.g. Five page templates, designed and built on your hosting]
  · [Revisions: N rounds. One round = one consolidated set of feedback,
     sent in a single response.]

WHAT THIS DOES NOT INCLUDE
[Name the specific adjacent things, not "anything not listed above":]
  · [e.g. Copywriting, photography, illustration]
  · [e.g. Migrating the existing blog archive]
  · [e.g. Print production management and press checks]

WHAT I HAVE ASSUMED
[The things you decided were true in order to price this. Numbered.]
  1. [e.g. Final copy is supplied by you before design begins]
  2. [e.g. One round of stakeholder review, consolidated by [name]]
  3. [e.g. Existing photography is licensed for this use]
  4. [e.g. Feedback returns within three working days]

OPTIONS
  [Name] — [one line of scope] — [timeline] — [price]
  [Name] — [one line of scope] — [timeline] — [price]
  [Name] — [one line of scope] — [timeline] — [price]
  [If the client has told you what the outcome is worth, put the
   arithmetic here in one sentence, against their number.]

DATES
  Start: [date, conditional on deposit and assumption 1]
  [Milestone]: [date]
  Delivery: [date]

TERMS
  [X]% payable to start, balance on delivery of final files.
  Payment due within [N] days. Ownership of the work transfers on
  final payment. Either party may end this in writing; work completed
  to that date is payable.

TO ACCEPT
  [One action. "Reply with the option you want and I will send the
   agreement and the deposit invoice today."]

The four lines that do the work

"Valid until." A proposal without an expiry is a price you have agreed to hold forever. Thirty days is normal and nobody has ever objected to it. It also gives you a graceful reason to make contact — a note that the quote is about to lapse is easier to send than a fourth follow-up, and it is true.

The assumptions block. This is the line most templates skip, and it is the one that pays for itself. Every fixed price is built on things you decided were probably true, and one of them is always wrong. Written down, that becomes a change order. Left in your head, it becomes a disagreement about what was implied. Same fact, different conversation.

The definition of a revision round. Not the number — the definition. "Two rounds" without a definition becomes six, because feedback arrives in a trickle of separate emails and each one feels too small to count.

"To accept." One action, described in one sentence, that you have committed to doing the same day. Ending with "let me know your thoughts" invites thoughts, and thoughts are not a purchase.

When three options do not fit

Plenty of jobs are one job. A single illustration, a one-page site, a logo for a business with one product. Forcing three tiers onto work that has one honest shape produces the padded version everyone can see through, and it is worth having a plan for that case rather than inventing scenery.

Replace the options block with one price and one genuinely separable addition, priced on its own line. The illustration, and separately the additional formats for social. The logo, and separately the usage sheet. That preserves the thing tiers are actually for, which is giving the buyer a decision that is not yes-or-no, without pretending the job divides three ways when it divides one way.

If even that is artificial, send one price. A single confident number on a well-scoped page is a perfectly good document, and it beats a badly built ladder.

Two checks before it goes

The arithmetic. If the middle option is the sum of a set of parts, add the parts up yourself and make sure they come to the number you wrote. A proposal where the figures do not reconcile is the single fastest way to lose a reader who was otherwise ready, because it puts your care in question at the exact moment they were assessing it.

The dates. Count them on a calendar rather than in your head, allow for the feedback windows you promised in the assumptions, and never quote a delivery date that assumes nobody takes a holiday. A date you miss by four days costs more goodwill than a date you set four days later would ever have cost you.

What to leave out

Your process diagram. Your studio history. The logo wall. A page of testimonials. Each of those is added to make a document feel substantial and each of them lengthens the distance between the reader and the price, which is the only part they are trying to find.

One thing to leave out that used to be advice on this very page: the trick of using a non-round number so the price "reads as calculated." North published that in four separate posts before anyone noticed, always with the same example, which is roughly the moment a technique stops being craft and starts being a tic. A price is credible because the reasoning behind it is visible, not because it ends in an odd digit.

Why the document matters even after the yes

Proposals get treated as sales collateral and then thrown away, which is a mistake, because for a lot of small projects the accepted proposal is the only written record of what anybody agreed to.

There is a thread on Hacker News from a freelancer being stiffed, and the first line of it is the whole lesson: originally when we started working together we didn't sign any contractual agreement, just word of mouth. He was paid for a few months, then things went silent. Whatever else is in your process, the scope and the terms need to exist somewhere both parties have seen. This document is the cheapest place to put them.

If you would rather have it as a file with the blanks already laid out, the fill-in version is the same thing. The reasoning behind each section is a longer read, and an entire proposal worked through with real arithmetic shows what the options block looks like when it is doing its job. North fills this shape in from your call notes if you would rather start from a draft than a blank page.