Executive Summary

Professional services firms—consultancies, IT services and agencies—routinely bid fixed-price or hybrid projects without reliable pre-sale profitability estimates, relying on spreadsheets and gut feel; project managers, sales leaders and finance teams suffer margin erosion and surprise losses as a result. This pain is widespread across an addressable base of roughly 320,000 firms. You could build a B2B SaaS product that connects to PSA, time-tracking and accounting APIs and uses AI-driven effort and duration forecasts to produce real-time pre-bid margin models, scenario sensitivity analysis, and proposal outputs embedded in the CRM/proposal workflow. The product would prioritize explainability, audit trails and one-click templates so sellers can quickly see how pricing, staffing mixes, and timelines affect margin. The market looks attractive now: roughly $9.6B TAM (320K firms × $30K ACV), high market/revenue scores (88/100), and secular trends—shift to fixed pricing, API-enabled systems, and maturing AI forecasting—lower barrier to automated pre-sale modeling. Competition is medium, meaning there’s room for a focused, well-executed entrant but you should expect incumbent PSA vendors and spreadsheet workflows to push back. You can stand out by combining deep, certified connectors to PSA/accounting/time systems, explainable ML forecasts, industry-specific templates, and seamless proposal integration to drive adoption; key challenges to plan for are integration complexity, seller trust in AI estimates, and change management to replace entrenched spreadsheet habits.

Market Opportunity

Predict consulting project profitability before you accept it targets a $9.6B = 320K professional services firms × $30K ACV total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 10% CAGR (professional services automation & project management software; source: IDC and Gartner market summaries, 2023-2024).

Key trends driving demand: Trend — More firms are shifting to fixed-price and hybrid engagements, increasing the need for pre-sale margin modeling so agreements remain profitable.; Trend — Adoption of cloud PSA, time-tracking, and accounting APIs reduces the friction of automated data collection, enabling real-time profitability calculations.; Trend — AI-driven forecasting for effort and duration is maturing, making pre-bid estimation more accurate and actionable than rule-of-thumb spreadsheets.; Trend — Financial scrutiny and CFO involvement in services firms has increased due to margin compression, driving purchases for tools that demonstrate ROI quickly..

Key competitors include Kantata (formerly Mavenlink), BigTime, Bonsai / AND CO.

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Predict consulting project profitability before you accept it

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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