For architects, engineers, planners and building surveyors
You opened the last one
and started deleting.
That’s how fee letters get written. Two to four hours. Every director doing it differently. And when someone asks what you quoted for this project type last year — and whether the fee held — there’s no answer, because none of it was ever data.
FeeLetter gets a considered letter out in ten minutes. Your template, your clauses, your current rate card.
No card. When the trial ends the account goes read-only and every letter you wrote stays yours — we don’t hold a firm’s documents against an invoice. Or book a walkthrough.
Fee proposal
FL-2026-0042
Wattlebrook Primary — stage 2 masterplan
- Date
- 27/07/26
- By
- EM
- Date
- 14/07/26
- By
- EM
- Date
- 02/07/26
- By
- EM
Every revision keeps its reason, its author and the rate card it was priced on.
What it costs now
Eighteen hours a month, at director rates.
Six fee letters. Three hours each. That’s most of a working week every quarter, spent by the most expensive people in the practice, retyping scope that already exists somewhere in the office.
The arithmetic isn’t the interesting part. What you do with eighteen hours is.
The part that costs more
The two hours isn’t the expensive part.
Every practice has a story about work it did for nothing because something didn’t carry across from the letter it was copied from. That’s not an annoyance. That’s fee already gone, and it happens again next time.
Exclusions that don’t carry
You excluded protection work on the last one. This letter was copied from a different one, and it doesn’t. Nobody finds out until month four.
Assumptions that drift
“Two client review cycles” was in the template once. Nobody can now say which letters still carry it and which quietly dropped it.
Terms nobody chose
A termination clause someone agreed to under pressure in 2023, propagating ever since, because it was in the letter that got copied.
FeeLetter keeps assumptions and exclusions attached to the clauses they belong to, so they travel together or not at all. Anything that isn’t your standard term is flagged before the letter goes out.
How it works
Four steps, in order.
01 · Services
Choose disciplines and stages, then pick scope clauses from your own library. Assumptions and exclusions come with them.
02 · Hours or fee
A grid of stages by grade — type hours, paste from Excel, or switch a stage to a lump sum. Or price from a published fee schedule, where the statutory charges calculate themselves.
03 · Terms
Exclusions and commercial terms pre-fill from your defaults. Anything non-standard is flagged before it goes out.
04 · Letter
Generate into your own Word template. Revision A, then B, then C — with the reason recorded each time.
What it produces
Your letter, not our letter.
We merge into the Word template you already send. Your letterhead, your clause wording, your sign-off. Clients shouldn’t be able to tell that anything changed.
Every fee line is kept as data — stage, grade, hours, rate — not just rendered into a document. That’s what makes next year’s question answerable.
Kestrelmoor Architects Pty Ltd
Ms A Whitcombe
Wattlebrook Primary School
Fee proposal — Stage 2 masterplan
| Concept design | 40.0 | $12,800.00 |
| Schematic design | 32.0 | $10,240.00 |
| Design development | 28.0 | $8,960.00 |
Setup
We build your library from your own letters. Two hours, not two months.
The reason tools like this fail is the setup. Nobody has a spare fortnight to retype a scope library, so the tool sits unused and the next letter gets written in Word again.
So we do it. Send us five to twenty past fee letters and we extract your scope clauses, assumptions, exclusions and terms — in your exact wording. Nothing becomes active until someone at your firm approves it.
- Your clauses, kept word for word — we do not improve your wording
- Every extracted clause shows its source document
- Nothing goes live until your practice manager approves it
- We tag your existing Word template so the output looks unchanged
And we’ll do the first pass before you’ve paid us anything.
For statutory work
The levies are right, and they stay right.
If you issue permits or certificates, your invoice carries charges you collect for someone else. FeeLetter calculates them from the cost of works, keeps them separate from your fee, treats them as GST-free, and rounds them the way the regulator requires.
Rates are versioned and effective-dated. Issuing a proposal freezes it to that day’s rules — a permit quoted now prices on today’s rules permanently, even after they change.
We track the rules. You don’t.
On the letter
GST is 10% of the professional fee alone. The levy is collected for the authority and is never part of the taxable base.
Fit
This is not a practice management system.
You do not need to replace anything. FeeLetter sits alongside Abtrac, Synergy, Deltek — or the spreadsheet you have been using for eleven years. It does one job: getting a considered fee letter out the door.
What we do not do
- Timesheets and job costing
- Invoicing and accounts
- Project scheduling
- Setting your fees for you
No AI anywhere near your numbers. The fee comes from your rate card and your hours, and every figure can be traced back to both.
Security and residency
Australian-hosted. Your fees stay commercially confidential.
- Data residency
- All firm and proposal data, including document processing, stays in ap-southeast-2.
- Tenant isolation
- Your rate card and fees are unreachable from any other firm.
- Cost rates
- Visible only to owners and admins — never to author-level staff.
- Your data
- Export everything, any time. Delete it and we mean it.
Who built this
Built by someone who has been inside your systems.
FeeLetter is made by Red Yellow Blue, a Melbourne consultancy that has spent years working inside Australian architecture, engineering and construction practices — their CRMs, their practice management systems, their reporting.
This product exists because the same problem turned up in every one of them: the fee letter is the most commercially important document a practice produces, and it is the one nobody has any system for.
Tom Leyden, Red Yellow Blue · Melbourne
Pricing
Transparent, per practice.
Practice
Up to 10
$450
per month, ex GST
3 author seats
Additional author $95/mo. Viewers unlimited.
Studio
11–35
$650
per month, ex GST
6 author seats
Additional author $95/mo. Viewers unlimited.
Firm
36–100
$900
per month, ex GST
12 author seats
Additional author $95/mo. Viewers unlimited.
Against eighteen hours of principal time a month, the software is the cheap part. Setup is where the work is, and we price it as work.
Setup and calibration from $4,000 one-off — rate card review, template configuration and scope library extraction. From $2,000 for schedule-priced practices, where the library is smaller.
Send us five letters.
We’ll extract your scope clauses, assumptions and exclusions — in your exact wording, with the source document recorded against each one — and send the library back to you as a document you can use however you like.
No charge. No commitment. You keep it either way.
Twenty minutes, using a real letter from your own practice — not a demo dataset.