I’ve been writing business proposals for ten years.
It started in Word. Open the last one I wrote, find-and-replace the client name, retype the scope, fight the pricing table when I added a fifteenth line item, manually export to PDF, hope my logo didn’t end up at 73% the wrong size on page two. Every proposal cost me 90 minutes minimum. Most cost two or three hours.
I’m a builder, so I tried to fix it. I wrote scripts — Python tools to merge templates with deal data, shell scripts to render PDFs, a half-finished React app I never quite shipped. Each made the next proposal a little faster. None made writing proposals stop feeling annoying.
Then I moved to proposal SaaS. Better Proposals first, then PandaDoc, then back. They were genuinely good — clean templates, embedded e-signatures, Stripe checkout, view tracking. The proposals looked great. Clients signed faster. I had a couple of clients sign just because they saw my proposal and asked, “can you do that for us?”
But the moment I wanted to do anything programmatic — wire it into my CRM, draft from a meeting transcript, automate the boring parts — I hit a wall. The API was gated behind enterprise plans at $50, $100, $500 a month. For my proposal volume, the math broke. I was paying SaaS prices for what was effectively a fancy template editor.
Meanwhile, on the other side of my screen, I was using AI tools to build entire web apps from prompts. Lovable. Cursor. v0. Apps that would have taken me a week were appearing in an hour. I’d describe what I wanted, the AI would draft it, I’d edit and ship.
One Tuesday I was using ChatGPT to draft a proposal — paste the discovery call summary, get a usable first draft, copy it into PandaDoc, fix the formatting for forty minutes — and I realized I’d been doing this for months. Half the proposal tool industry was a copy-paste destination for ChatGPT output. None of them were doing the actual writing.
So I built the thing I needed.
ProposalMCP is what happens when you start from “the AI does the writing” and work backwards. Drop a transcript, a website, or a sentence. Get a branded, signable proposal in two minutes. Use it from our chat, from Claude Desktop as an MCP server, from ChatGPT as a connector, or from a Granola webhook when your meeting ends. Pay for what you use. Bring your own AI key if you want.
We don’t gate the API. We don’t charge per seat. We don’t make you sign an annual contract with a 60-day cancellation notice. The things every other tool puts behind their highest-priced plan — custom domains, API access, agent control — we just give you. That’s the product. It’s also the difference.
— Tim, founder