Free proofreading business tools and guides
Everything you need to plan, price, and launch your proofreading business, free. Use the calculators, take the checklist, and read the template guides.
- Four calculators for pricing, startup costs, and earnings
- Two step-by-step guides to starting and growing
- Ten template guides covering the paperwork
Free tools and guides
No sign-up needed. Use them as often as you like.
Proofreading Rate Calculator
Work out what to charge for a job. It runs from the word count, the state the text is actually in, and the speed you can work at without missing things, so the quote has reasons behind it. Per word, per hour and per project are all worked the same way so you can compare them honestly.
Open it now
Startup Cost Calculator
What it costs to start, which is less than most trades and not nothing. Style guides, the software, a website, and the unpaid hours spent building samples before anyone hires you. The line people miss is the months of pitching before the first regular client appears.
Open it nowEarnings Calculator
Model a month and a year. Put in the words you can realistically get through, your rate, and the costs you carry, and see what is left. Change one number at a time to find which moves your income, which is usually your rate rather than your speed.
Open it nowBusiness Name Generator
Names that sound like a professional rather than a hobby. It builds from what clients actually search when they need something checked, and skips the Red-Pen and Comma constructions that are already taken many times over and date quickly.
Open it nowHow to Start a Proofreading Business
The full guide, in order. Deciding what you proofread, learning the conventions that matter, setting your rates, finding the first clients, and building the repeat work that makes it a living rather than a trickle. Start here if you have not settled on a niche.
Open it nowHow Much Can You Make?
What the work actually pays, with the arithmetic shown. Per-word freelance work, transcript proofreading and retained clients broken out separately, because they pay very differently, and an honest account of what the first year usually looks like.
Open it nowTemplate library
What each document a proofreading business runs on needs to contain.
Proofreading Business Plan Template
A clear plan turns "I want to be a proofreader" into something you can act on. This fill-in-the-blank structure walks through every section a partner, a lender or a future you needs to see, including the two most plans in this trade leave out: how many words a week you can actually take on, and what happens in the months when the academic work stops.
Read the guideProofreading Business Startup Checklist
Most people starting out do the right things in the wrong order, and the usual casualty is pricing: a rate set before you know how fast you read is a guess you then have to defend to a client. This checklist puts the steps in the order that makes each one cheaper than it would otherwise have been.
Read the guideProofreading Checklist Template
A checklist is what turns proofreading from a careful read into a repeatable process. The point is not that you would otherwise forget what a comma is, but that certain error classes survive a first pass reliably, and the only defense is to hunt each one deliberately rather than hope to notice it.
Read the guideProofreading Style Sheet Template
The style sheet is the single most useful document in this trade and the one beginners skip. It is where you record every decision you made that the text did not make for you, so the job is consistent, defensible and, when the client asks why you changed something on page 200, answerable in one line.
Read the guideProofreading Services Agreement Template
Almost every dispute in this trade traces back to one of three things being unwritten: what you agreed to change, when it was due, and what happens if the file turns out to be much heavier than the sample suggested. A short agreement that covers those three is worth more than a long one that covers none of them.
Read the guideProofreading Quote Template
The mistake that costs new proofreaders the most money is quoting from a word count. Two 60,000-word documents can differ by a factor of three in the time they take, and the only way to know which one you have been sent is to assess a sample of it first. This structures a quote around that.
Read the guideProofreading Invoice Template
Proofreading invoices are small, frequent and often international, which makes the boring fields the important ones. Most late payments in this trade are not disputes, they are invoices that lacked something the client accounts process needed and sat in a queue nobody was watching.
Read the guideProofreading Rate Card Template
A rate card is not a price list you publish and defend forever. It is the internal structure you quote from, so that every job is priced the same way and the awkward cases, the rush job and the file that is much heavier than it looked, already have an answer rather than being negotiated from scratch each time.
Read the guideProofreading Cover Letter Template
A cover letter for proofreading work is doing something unusual: it is a sample of the exact skill being hired. A typo in it is not an unlucky blemish, it is a demonstration, and every agency in this trade will tell you it is the fastest filter they have. This structures one that survives that reading.
Read the guideFreelance Proofreader Resume Template
A freelance proofreading resume is read by somebody deciding whether to send you a file this week, which makes it a different document from a career resume. What they need is your specialty, the style guides you work to, your capacity and your reliability. A chronology of unrelated jobs is not what is being looked for.
Read the guide