Pilot tracks projects, work orders, and time entries - and ships built-in AI Estimate and AI Proposal engines so the same tool that runs your project also generates the quote that won it. No second SaaS subscription, no copy-paste between apps, no Zapier glue.
Behind the Gantt and Kanban views is structured-output AI that takes your project scope and produces a real quantified estimate - line items, labour hours, materials, contingency - and a polished client-facing proposal document in your brand voice. Built for the SMB operator who's tired of paying for one tool to run projects and another to write proposals.
And because Pilot is part of the Vastura stack, your time entries flow straight into Ledger as COGS labour, your asset registers stay current, and your Conductor agent can run cross-project status reports without you touching a spreadsheet.
15-day free trial - No credit card - CAD-pricedThe SMB project management market is a graveyard of incomplete tools. The popular kanban-only tool is $30-$60/mo CAD per seat and doesn't do Gantt or time tracking. The popular Gantt-heavy tool is $40-$80/mo CAD per seat and doesn't do AI estimates. The proposal-writing tool is another $50-$120/mo CAD. The time-tracker that posts to your accounting is another $20-$40/mo CAD.
Stack those together for a five-person team and you're $300-$1,500/mo CAD across four logins, none of which know about each other. When you want to know whether project X actually made money, you export four CSVs, drop them into Excel, and hope nothing's missing. Margin reporting at the project level basically doesn't exist for SMB operators using stitched-together tools.
Worse, the estimate-to-proposal pipeline is manual. You spend two hours scoping a job, an hour pricing it, an hour writing the proposal, and another hour formatting it in Word. For a $5,000 job that's four hours of unpaid presales work - at your real billable rate that's $400+ of opportunity cost per quote. Win rate on cold quotes is maybe 30%, so you spend 13+ hours of unpaid work per closed deal.
Pilot exists because the project tool industry treats SMB operators as scaled-down enterprises. We treat you as someone running a real business who needs the project tracking, the estimate, the proposal, and the time-to-accounting feed in one platform priced for Canadian SMBs.
Pilot Starter at $29/mo CAD gives you one workspace with Gantt, Kanban, WBS, and task views plus up to 5 team members. It's the entry tier for the solo PM or small team running one project at a time. The Pro tier at $59/mo unlocks the real moat: up to 3 workspaces, the AI Estimate Engine, the AI Proposal Engine, Ledger time-sync to COGS, FMV-to-Asset Register integration, and the client portal.
The AI Estimate Engine takes a project scope (typed or pasted from a client RFQ) and produces a structured estimate with quantified line items, labour hours by role, materials, contingency, and a final quote total. The AI Proposal Engine then turns that estimate plus your brand voice into a polished client-facing proposal document - formatted, exportable to PDF, and ready to send. Both engines are built on structured-output AI that returns real data, not hallucinated text blobs.
Time tracking is integrated end-to-end. Log hours on a project task, assign a costed labour rate, and Pilot posts the Founder Hours journal to Ledger automatically on weekly close. Your project P&L updates live - so when you finish a job, you know exactly what your margin was after labour, materials, and overhead allocation. Stop guessing at job profitability.
Pilot Enterprise at $199/mo CAD adds multi-entity project consolidation (run projects across multiple Vastura entities with portfolio P&L), approval workflows, resource forecasting, custom workflow states, and the dedicated CSM. The Enterprise tier is for operations teams running 10+ concurrent projects across multiple entities - where the cost of mistakes is large enough to justify the proper PMO surface.
Twelve modules covering everything from initial scope to client-portal sign-off - built for the SMB operator who hates manual proposal writing.
Three project views, all live and synced. Gantt for timeline-driven projects, Kanban for flow-state work, WBS for hierarchical breakdown. Switch views on the fly. Drag-and-drop scheduling with dependency-aware re-planning when a task slips.
Structured-output AI that takes a scope description and returns a real quantified estimate: line items, labour hours by role, materials cost, contingency percentage, and total. Editable before send. Trained on your historical project data so estimates improve over time as you close more jobs.
Generates a polished client-facing proposal document from your estimate plus brand voice. PDF-exportable, formatted, with cover page, scope, timeline, pricing, terms. Cuts proposal-writing time from 2 hours to 10 minutes. Brand voice pulled from Brand Lab corpus if present.
Log hours against a project and Pilot posts the Founder Hours journal into Ledger as project COGS. Costed labour rates per role per entity. Margin reporting updates live. No more uncertainty around what a given project actually made.
See who's overloaded before you assign the next task. Resource view shows committed hours per person per week against their capacity. Heat-map view flags overloads. Particularly useful for the Pro tier solo operator who keeps double-booking themselves.
Cross-project dependencies with critical path highlighting. If task A slips, every downstream task auto-rescheduled and Pilot flags the impact. Critical path view shows which tasks can slip without affecting delivery date - and which ones can't.
Customer-facing project portal where clients can see status, upload files, approve milestones, and pay invoices. Self-service reduces email-back-and-forth by ~60% per our internal usage data across Vastura Digital projects.
Vendor / sub-contractor portal - for when you sub out work to a freelancer or specialist firm. They log their hours, you approve, and Pilot routes the bill capture into Ledger AP. End-to-end sub-contractor workflow in one tool.
Up to 3 workspaces at Pro, unlimited at Enterprise. Each workspace can be a separate entity, business unit, or client account. Portfolio view at Enterprise rolls up status, P&L, and resource load across every workspace in real time.
Internal-build projects in Pilot that produce IP or fixed assets feed their FMV into the Ledger Asset Register on completion. CCA depreciation starts the same day. Critical for SR&ED and grant claims tied to internal-build asset value.
Configurable approval gates - quote sign-off, milestone sign-off, change-order sign-off, final delivery sign-off. Routes to the right approver based on dollar threshold and project type. Audit-logged for compliance.
Enterprise tier only. Run projects across multiple Vastura-managed entities and roll them up into a single portfolio view. Useful for holdcos billing clients across multiple subs and needing one cross-entity status report.
| Feature | Vastura | Industry SMB average |
|---|---|---|
| Gantt + Kanban + WBS views | ✓ from Starter | ✓ Starter+ |
| AI Estimate Engine (structured-output) | ✓ Pro+ | × |
| AI Proposal Engine (structured-output) | ✓ Pro+ | × |
| Ledger time-sync to COGS labour cost | ✓ Pro+ | × requires Zapier glue typically |
| Multi-workspace project portfolios | ✓ Pro | ✓ Pro |
| Cross-project dependencies + critical path | ✓ Pro+ | ✓ Pro+ |
| Resource capacity planning | ✓ Pro+ | ✓ |
| FMV to Asset Register integration | ✓ Pro+ | × |
| Client portal + service-provider portal | ✓ Pro+ | partial client-only typically |
| Multi-entity project consolidation | ✓ Enterprise | × rare in SMB tier |
| Time-tracking with rate-cost overlay | ✓ Pro+ | partial requires add-on |
| Approval workflows | ✓ Enterprise | ✓ Pro+ |
| CAD-priced (no FX surcharge) | ✓ every tier | × |
| MCP bridge (agent-operable) | ✓ Enterprise | × |
| Project P&L (live margin) | ✓ Pro+ | partial |
| Portfolio P&L cross-entity | ✓ Enterprise | × |
| Sub-contractor / vendor portal | ✓ Pro+ | × |
The Pro tier at $59/mo CAD bundles project management, AI estimate, AI proposal, time tracking, Ledger COGS sync, client portal, and FMV to Asset Register. Equivalent USD-priced incumbents would cost $200-$400/mo CAD across separate tools after FX - and still wouldn't have the integrated estimate-to-proposal-to-invoice flow.
If you're a sole PM or two-person team, Pro pays back in the first month of saved proposal-writing time. The AI Proposal Engine alone replaces 1-2 hours of manual writing per quote. Win three jobs a month and the tool has paid for itself ten times over in unbilled hours saved.
Every tier includes a 15-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Annual billing saves 25%. All prices in Canadian dollars.
Single PM or small team running one project at a time
Growing team with multi-project portfolio + Ledger time sync
PMO running cross-entity project consolidation
15-day free trial - Cancel anytime - CAD-priced - No FX surcharge
Four personas we built this product for. Find yours below.
Jordan PMs three concurrent client projects at any time. Starter at $29/mo gives her one workspace and Gantt + Kanban views. She tracks her time manually for client billing.
Best fit: Pilot Starter
Alex runs a 5-person agency with 8-12 concurrent client projects. Pro at $59/mo gives him 3 workspaces, the AI Estimate Engine (cuts quote time 80%), and Ledger sync so his team's time auto-posts to project COGS. Margin reporting at the project level is finally accurate.
Best fit: Pilot Pro
Lisa's construction holdco runs 4 entities and 25+ active projects. Enterprise at $199/mo handles unlimited workspaces, portfolio P&L across entities, and approval workflows for change-orders above $5K. Conductor agent does weekly status digests.
Best fit: Pilot Enterprise
Marcus's team builds internal SaaS apps. Pro tier tracks internal-build labour, calculates project FMV on completion, and pushes the asset value to Ledger Asset Register with proper CCA class. Drives SR&ED claims and IP register valuation.
Best fit: Pilot Pro / Enterprise
Vastura is a stack, not a single tool. Each product passes data into the next so you stop running glue scripts and CSV exports.
Pilot time tracking posts the weekly Founder Hours / labour journal to Ledger as project COGS. Costed labour rate per role per entity. Margin reporting updates live in Ledger project P&L.
Pilot time -> Ledger JE -> Project COGSInternal-build projects that produce IP feed FMV into Ledger Asset Register on completion. CCA class assigned at handover. Depreciation starts same day. SR&ED-friendly.
Pilot completion -> Ledger Asset -> CCA scheduleTasks in Pilot can spawn tickets in Keystone with linked status. When the Keystone ticket closes, the Pilot task updates automatically.
Pilot task -> Keystone ticket -> Resolution syncConductor agent (Pro+) can query Pilot through the MCP bridge for weekly status reports, blocker lists, and resource-load summaries. Ask in natural language; get a structured digest.
Conductor chat -> MCP query -> Pilot digestAI Proposal Engine pulls brand voice corpus from Brand Lab to write the proposal in your actual brand voice. Multi-entity SMBs get entity-correct proposal voice automatically.
Brand Lab corpus -> Pilot AI Proposal -> Branded PDFCosted labour rates flow from People (HR records) into Pilot for project costing. Pay run from Payroll ties to the same hours in Pilot - closing the time-to-cost-to-payroll loop.
People rate -> Pilot costed hour -> Payroll runService products sold via Launch Pad storefronts auto-create a Pilot project for fulfillment. Customer detail, scope, and timeline all pre-populated.
Launch Pad sale -> Pilot project create -> FulfillmentAttach Studio-created images, reels, and brand assets to Pilot project tasks as deliverables. Client portal renders them inline so the client can review without leaving Pilot.
Studio asset -> Pilot deliverable -> Client portal reviewEvery Vastura tier includes a 15-day free trial. No credit card is required up front - you only enter payment when you decide to keep the subscription past day 15. If you cancel within the trial window, your data stays accessible in read-only mode for 30 days so you can export everything cleanly.
If you subscribe and decide within 15 days that Pilot is not the right fit, contact support and we refund the prorated month in full - no questions, no retention call. Annual subscribers get a prorated refund on unused months minus a 5% admin fee, processed back to the original payment method within 7 business days.
Yes - your data is yours. Vastura supports full CSV / JSON / PDF export across every product. Pilot exports include all transactional records, configuration, audit log entries, and attachments. We also provide a Cutover Toolkit (Enterprise tier) for migrating to or from competing platforms with mapping templates included.
Multi-entity is native, not an afterthought. From the Pro tier upward, you can run multiple businesses (Inc / sole prop / partnerships) under one login with per-entity books, branding, and identity. The Enterprise tier unlocks unlimited entities plus consolidated reporting across the holdco. One operator, multiple businesses, one subscription instead of one-per-entity.
Vastura Ltd is Alberta-incorporated and built specifically for Canadian operators. USD-priced SaaS hits Canadian SMBs with a 35-40% FX surcharge after exchange and credit card cross-border fees. We price in CAD, charge in CAD, and write all tax surfaces (GST/HST, CCA, T2 prep) to Canadian rules first. International expansion comes later, but Canada is home base.
All Vastura data sits on Cloudflare's enterprise tier with end-to-end TLS 1.3, at-rest encryption, role-based access control, and a full audit log on every write. We're on the SOC 2 Type 1 - Type 2 roadmap (Type 1 target Q2 2027) and ISO 27001 (Q1 2028). PIPEDA compliance is built in by default - Canadian data residency is on the roadmap for late 2026.
The honest answer: most SMB-tier alternatives are single-tool, USD-priced, and don't talk to each other. Vastura's moat is the integrated stack - Ledger feeds Pilot feeds Studio feeds Launch Pad through the MCP bridge, and CAD-pricing means no FX surcharge. We don't claim to beat every dedicated single-tool incumbent on every micro-feature, but we beat the total cost of running 6 separate USD SaaS subscriptions glued together with Zapier.
No. Onboarding is guided - connect your bank or Shopify, walk through the entity wizard, and you're posting transactions or running storefronts within the first 30 minutes. The optional MCP layer (for AI agent operation) does benefit from a technical user, but the dashboard, reports, and day-to-day workflow are designed for the operator-without-an-IT-department.
Upgrades are prorated and instant - switch from Starter to Pro and you only pay the difference for the remaining days in the cycle. Downgrades take effect at the next renewal so you keep what you paid for. The Conductor agent can also recommend tier changes based on actual usage patterns at the Pro tier and above.
Yes - annual billing is 25% off the monthly rate, applied across every tier and every product. Registered Canadian non-profits and charities can apply for an additional 20% discount (contact support with your CRA registration number). Bundle suites (Ops / Ecomm / Pro / Enterprise) include built-in discounts on top of that.