Estii: pricing and estimation software for tech services firms at $10K a month

Estii sells commercial operations software to technology services firms — one model that connects scope, effort, pricing, margin, revenue and schedule before a deal is committed — and it was at $10K a month in revenue, founder-reported in the February 2024 interview.

How it started

David Peek and Dom De Lorenzo spent 12 years together at Deltatre, a global product and services business building live and on-demand video services for content owners. De Lorenzo was Senior Vice President of products; Peek spent seven years on the service delivery team and five as Director of Solution Engineering.

Their problem was estimating. Solutions at Deltatre spanned whole video delivery pipelines — capture and events management at a stadium through to transcoding, packaging and playback on the device — and turning customer requirements into a price meant pulling input from a long list of internal and external stakeholders. The team used, in Peek's description, very clever spreadsheets. Populating them was slow and error-prone, and sales, finance and delivery each kept their own version of the truth, with data copied by hand between spreadsheets, pitch documents and other platforms.

Configure-price-quote tools existed, but in the founders' experience they were built for businesses selling products from a price list, not for iterating on a complex services deal while watching profitability. Peek's manager invested time in better internal estimation tooling, and some of the earliest Estii concepts were built in his evenings and tested on live opportunities. The takeaway from that period was that the interface between sales, solutions and delivery teams was where the differentiation lay. Corporate transactions at Deltatre gave the two of them enough confidence to leave and work on Estii full time. The company started in May 2021 and is based in Sydney, NSW, Australia.

What it sells and how it charges

Estii's official website, fetched on 2026-09-30, describes the product as "Commercial Ops for technology services" and pitches "One commercial model for every deal." The site's framing is deterministic at the core, with AI used to inform decisions rather than replace the model.

The product breaks into five areas, plus an agent interface:

Scope management — shape scope, price and delivery together, seeing the effect on budget, margin, timelines and capacity.
Service estimation — combine project work, products, licences, recurring services and overheads in one price.
Scheduling & resource planning — generate timelines and resource plans from estimates, then test delivery scenarios.
Revenue & capacity forecasting — model how a commercial decision affects capacity, revenue and delivery before signing.
Commercial knowledge — turn proven work into reusable work items and templates.
MCP server — let an AI agent ask what a scope change does to margin or reprice a deal, using the same model the team uses.

The homepage also displays counters for deal value approved in Estii ($145M+), median approved deal value ($800K+), win rate on approved deals (47.2%) and average margin on approved deals (61.0%). Those are Estii's own published figures, as shown when the site was fetched.

Pricing is based on approved deals rather than seats, and users are unlimited on the paid plans. A deal approval is defined on the pricing page as signing off a commercial version of a deal, ready to share, forecast, sync or hand over.

Plan	Price (USD, excl. local sales taxes)	Deal approvals	Other limits
Free	$0	3 / month	Up to 10 users, 10 active deals, Excel export, watermarked PDF & PPTX, read-only API
Business	$350 / mo, billed annually	25 / month	Unlimited users, 100 active deals, no-watermark export, multiple rate cards and currencies, full API, pipeline forecasts
Enterprise	From $1,000 / mo, billed annually	50+ / month	Unlimited users, 200+ active deals, SSO, CRM and workflow integrations, advanced approvals and audit controls

Annual billing saves 10%. Paid subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing cycle unless terminated. Annual paid plans include a guided setup in which Estii loads a customer's real rates and one real deal.

How it got its first customers, and what kept growth going

Customer acquisition ran on targeted LinkedIn and Google campaigns plus heavy SEO work on the website, so the product shows up for people already searching for it. The channel that changed the maths, though, was in person: walking a trade show floor with an iPad and a pitch put De Lorenzo and Peek in front of decision-makers at technology services businesses, "condensing months of outreach into just a few hours."

The recurring obstacle was that the people using Estii day to day are often not the people who can change how a company prices and approves work. Rather than sell harder at the top, the team made it easy for an individual practitioner to sign up and explore alone — trials, first-run guides, importers, sample deals and data visualisations that a champion can take into an internal meeting. Retention came from responding to feedback about repetitive tasks, with Peek and De Lorenzo taking frustrations and ideas directly.

One product change illustrates the pattern: adding guest users raised user numbers and activity because business stakeholders who were not building estimates still wanted visibility of commercial proposals for forecasting and preparation. The company is 100% bootstrapped and was cautiously increasing ad spend as revenue grew, focused on the US, UK, Canadian and Australian markets, with localization planned later that year.

The numbers

Revenue: $10K a month, founder-reported in the February 2024 interview. That figure is what the founder said at that date; it is not current revenue.

Team at the time of the interview: two founders, zero employees. Founded May 2021, based in Sydney, NSW, Australia, and bootstrapped. In the same interview, Peek said Estii had helped customers win over USD 8 million in new business in the previous 12 months — money won by customers on their own deals, not Estii revenue. The interview does not state a starting cost for the business.

How it compares

For context, 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews (2015–2026) — a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses — puts the Software & SaaS category at 354 businesses with founder-reported revenue and a median monthly revenue of $40K. Estii sits below that category median.

Other category medians and shares from the same analysis: 35% of the category reports $1M a year or more, median employees is 4.0, and 45% of the category was started by one founder, where Estii had two. Among the 244 Software & SaaS businesses with channel information, the most common growth channels are organic social media (55%), SEO and organic search (54%), word of mouth and referrals (31%) and paid ads (31%). Estii's mix overlaps with two of those — SEO and paid ads — and adds trade shows, which do not appear among the top four.

What a founder can take from it

Sell to the handoff, not the artefact. The insight that produced Estii was not "a better proposal document" but the gap between sales, solutions and delivery, where the same numbers get rebuilt in three places. If your product removes a handoff, that is the thing to name.

Price against the event that creates value. Estii charges by approved deals, not by seats, and lets paid plans have unlimited users. That structure lets a whole team sit inside the tool without the buyer renegotiating every time someone new logs in.

Make it possible for a non-buyer to prove it. Trials, importers and sample data exist so an individual practitioner can demonstrate value before a purchasing decision is in play. Where your users and your buyers are different people, self-serve evidence beats a better pitch deck.

Put the product where the buyers physically are. Trade shows compressed months of outreach into hours for a two-person team with no sales staff.

Revisit build-versus-buy honestly. Estii built its marketing site on a no-code tool to stay focused on the product, found the result fell below the quality of the product itself, and rebuilt it 18 months later — in less time than the original took.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure