Quote (Stripe)

A Quote in Stripe is a formal, itemized price proposal you send to a customer before billing begins. It captures the products, prices, quantities, discounts, and terms of a deal, and once the customer accepts it, Stripe can automatically turn it into an invoice or a subscription.

How a quote works

A quote moves through a simple lifecycle:

1. Draft — you build the line items, apply discounts, and set an expiration date.
2. Open — you finalize and send it; the customer reviews a hosted quote page.
3. Accepted — the customer approves, and Stripe generates the resulting invoice or subscription.
4. Canceled — the quote is withdrawn or expires without acceptance.

Because the quote holds the agreed terms, the objects it creates inherit those exact prices and quantities, so what the customer approved is what they're billed. For multi-phase deals — say a discounted first year that steps up later — a quote can create a subscription schedule that encodes each phase.

Why quotes matter

Quotes bridge sales and billing. For sales-led SaaS, they replace ad-hoc spreadsheets and PDFs with a system-of-record proposal that flows straight into revenue once signed, reducing manual re-entry and pricing errors.

They also make deal value explicit. The total contract value and the recurring component of a quote feed directly into metrics like ACV, and an accepted quote is the moment a booking becomes real billing. Tracking quote acceptance rates and average deal size gives sales-led teams a forecasting signal that pure self-serve businesses read from checkout instead.