Cost Breakdown by Role
Here's what a typical proposal costs for a mid-size federal or provincial RFP:
| Role | Hours |
|---|---|
| Business Development Go/no-go analysis, capture strategy, positioning | 4 — 8 h |
| Proposal Manager Coordination, compliance, schedule tracking, follow-ups | 12 — 20 h |
| Subject Matter Experts Methodology, technical approach, CVs | 15 — 30 h |
| Executive Review Strategic validation, final read, sign-off | 2 — 4 h |
| Production / Layout Formatting, table of contents, pagination, printing | 4 — 8 h |
| Total | 37 — 70 h |
$3,700 — $7,000
Estimated cost per proposal at $100/h (blended rate)
These numbers are for a mid-complexity RFP. Large federal RFPs with security requirements, oral presentations, and technical demos can easily exceed 100 hours and $10,000.
The Annual Impact
Scale that cost over a full year and the number gets sobering:
50
Proposals per year
$5,000
Avg cost per proposal
$250,000
Annual spend
$250,000 per year. That's the salary and benefits of a senior consultant who could be billing to clients instead of writing proposals.
We knew it was expensive, but when we actually did the math — counting everyone's time — we realized we were spending the equivalent of a senior salary just producing proposals. It changed how we think about investing in tools.
And this calculation doesn't include opportunity cost. Every hour an expert spends writing a proposal is an hour they're not billing to a client.
Where to Cut Costs
You don't need to automate everything at once. Four levers have the most impact:
Extraction Automation
Clarido reads the RFP and extracts the requirements. No more page-by-page reading or copy-pasting into spreadsheets.
Estimated savings: ~6 h per proposal
Content Reuse
Standard content blocks (firm overview, methodology, quality) are created once and inserted with one click. No more rewriting the same sections.
Estimated savings: ~5 h per proposal
Automated Compliance Checking
The checklist automatically lists every extracted requirement. You track compliance manually, but the heavy lifting of compiling the list is done.
Estimated savings: ~2 h per proposal
Assembly and Formatting
The final document assembles automatically: table of contents, pagination, consistent formatting. Production goes from 8 hours to 1.
Estimated savings: ~4 h per proposal
The Case for Automation
Here's the ROI calculation with conservative assumptions:
Return on Investment
- Hours saved per proposal
- ~17 h
- Blended hourly rate
- $75/h
- Savings per proposal
- $1,275
- Proposals per year
- 50
- Annual savings
- $63,750
Nearly $64,000 in estimated direct savings. But the real gain is elsewhere: with 17 fewer hours per proposal, your team can respond to more RFPs per year. At a 40% win rate and $200,000 average contracts, the incremental revenue far exceeds the direct savings.
$63,750
Estimated annual savings
+20%
Additional capacity
15x
Return on investment
The payback is visible from the first month. There's no six-month transformation project to run; you upload an RFP and see the difference.