Financial architecture for interior design firms
Your firm.
Your numbers.
Finally clear.
Sightline answers the three questions every interior design firm owner is asking — what should I charge, am I hitting my targets, and was this project actually profitable. One platform. Built for the way a design firm actually works.
Early access open now · Founding firm pricing available
Rate architecture · your financial floor
$611
/hr
Below break-even
Your aligned rate. The minimum your cost structure requires.
Your rate
$250/hr
−$361/hr below floor
Break-even
$354/hr
Cost-only floor
Margin target
42%
$257/hr per hour
Hours this week
12.5 / 30
Active projects
4
2 healthy · 1 watch
Capacity
Comfortable
263 hrs available
Four questions. One platform.
The answers every designer
needs but rarely has.
Most interior designers run their firms on instinct, industry averages, and a spreadsheet that hasn't been updated since last year. Sightline replaces all of that with your actual numbers — built from your compensation, your expenses, your team, and your hours.
1
What should I charge?
Not what someone told you at a conference. Not what the designer down the street charges. Your number — derived from what your firm actually costs to run, what you need to take home, and what your team costs. Sightline calculates your aligned rate and shows you exactly how it's built, layer by layer.
2
Am I hitting my targets?
Hours, revenue, and capacity tracked in real time — not at the end of the year when it's too late to adjust. Sightline shows you how your current week compares to your targets, where your workload is distributed across the next sixteen weeks, and exactly when you have room for the next inquiry.
3
Was this project actually profitable?
Not — did the client pay the invoice. Did the project cover what it actually cost your firm to deliver it? Sightline tracks margin against your aligned rate in real time — so you know while the project is still open, not after you've closed it and moved on.
4
Is it time to grow?
Not the feeling that you need help — the financial reality of whether the firm can support it. Adding a team member, taking on a larger engagement, moving to a bigger studio: each one changes your cost floor, your aligned rate, and your capacity picture. Sightline models both sides before you commit — what growth adds in revenue potential, and what it adds in cost — so the decision comes from numbers, not exhaustion.
Rate architecture
Your rate is a building.
Five layers. One floor.
Every cost your firm carries contributes to the minimum hourly rate you need to charge. Sightline makes that structure visible — so you can see exactly what each layer costs per billable hour and what changes when anything shifts.
Layer 01 — Foundation
What you pay yourself
Your draw, payroll tax, health insurance, retirement. This is the base everything else sits on. Get it wrong and nothing above it holds.
Layer 02 — Structure
What it costs to run the firm
Software, insurance, rent, subscriptions. Fixed costs that run whether you bill ten hours this week or forty. Every subscription you add raises this layer.
Layer 03 — Systems
What your team actually costs
Not their salary — their fully burdened cost. Each person added raises the load this building has to carry. Sightline calculates this automatically.
Layer 04 — The envelope
How many hours you actually bill
A building that sits half-empty still costs the same to maintain. Every unbilled hour raises what each billed hour has to carry. Utilization is the most underestimated lever in the firm.
Layer 05 — The finish
Margin — what makes growth possible
You can't finish a building that isn't structurally complete. Margin is what funds slow months, future hires, and your next chapter. It's not a bonus — it's what you build toward.
Margin+$257/hr
Billable hours730/yr
Team cost$74k/yr
Operating expenses$53k/yr
Owner compensation$137k/yr
Cost floor
Aligned rate
Your minimum floor
$611/hr
The gap
The space between what you charge and what you need to charge
has a cost.
Most designers have never seen this number. It's been accumulating quietly — in every project, in every proposal, in every year that ended with a full calendar and less money than the effort deserved.
$72k
per year at a $100/hr gap across 720 billable hours. The gap doesn't announce itself. It just compounds.
$360k
over five years if the rate stays flat while costs grow. Which they always do.
3
levers to close it. Rate. Utilization. Cost structure. Sightline shows you which one moves the needle most for your firm.
Closing the gap
Three levers.
Every path runs through one of them.
Most designers assume the only answer is to raise the rate. But depending on the composition of your gap — how much is pricing, how much is utilization, how much is cost structure — one lever might close more than the others.
01
Raise what you charge
The most direct lever. Every dollar you raise your rate closes the gap by a dollar on every future hour billed. A phased increase — new clients first, existing clients with 90 days notice — is often the lowest-friction path.
At $100/hr gap: a $50 rate increase closes half the gap in every hour billed from that moment forward. One proposal at the new rate is enough to start.
02
Bill more of the hours you already work
Recovering unbilled time lowers your aligned rate — because the same cost floor is divided across more revenue. No rate change required. The hours are already there. The question is whether you're logging them.
At 38% utilization: raising billable hours from 15 to 20 per week drops the aligned rate by $153/hr. More than a $100 rate increase would.
03
Reduce what it costs to deliver
Every dollar removed from your cost floor lowers your aligned rate. Software you're not using, subscriptions that renewed automatically, tools that made sense two years ago. Eliminating them gives every hour more room.
Cutting $6,000/yr in operating expenses at 730 billable hours lowers the aligned rate by $8/hr — permanently, without a single client conversation.
Capacity
Not how full the bucket is.
When you have room.
Knowing you're at 70% capacity today tells you nothing about whether August is wide open or already overcommitted. Sightline maps your workload week by week across sixteen weeks so you can answer the inquiry that just landed with data — not a feeling.
Weekly pressure chart
16 weeks of committed hours vs. your target — color-coded by pressure so the shape of your workload is visible at a glance.
Project timeline
Every active project mapped across a six-month window. See where projects overlap and where pressure concentrates.
What-if tool
Enter estimated hours and a start window — Sightline tells you whether the project fits, how much of the window it uses, and what's left.
Weekly pressure — next 16 weeks
Within target
Approaching
Over committed
Now — end of July
Room for a mid-size engagement or several smaller ones.
~210 hrs
August — September
Limited availability. Small scope only or defer.
~95 hrs
October — December
Best window for a large engagement this year.
~280 hrs
Built for design firms
Everything the firm needs.
Nothing generic software adds.
Aligned rate
Your financial floor, calculated from your inputs
Five-layer rate architecture built from your compensation, operating expenses, team costs, billable hours, and margin target. Updates in real time when anything changes. Rate history shows every change and why it happened.
Always visible on the dashboard →
Project profitability
Margin tracked against your aligned rate — not just what you quoted
Real-time project margin shows how many hours remain, what the current margin is, and whether the project is still on track — or drifting. Data freshness states surface when time entries go stale before the margin figure becomes unreliable.
Live on every project card →
Capacity planning
Work arriving over time — not a percentage, a picture
Weekly pressure chart across 16 weeks, project timeline view, dynamically calculated open windows, and a what-if tool that answers "can I take this?" before you commit. Say yes from data, not optimism.
Timeline tab in capacity view →
Personalized action engine
The most leveraged action for your firm, right now
Gap composition analysis identifies whether your gap is primarily a pricing problem, a utilization problem, or a cost structure problem — then surfaces specific actions with your actual dollar amounts. Never repeats the same framing if nothing's changed. Holds prior commitments accountable before suggesting new ones.
Updates on every dashboard load →
Team visibility
Every team member's capacity and contribution — in one view
Per-member capacity cards show target hours, hours logged this week, and status. The team hours tile on the dashboard surfaces who's logged and who hasn't — with a one-click reminder that goes only to members who are behind.
Team tab in capacity view →
Model a change
Scenario modeling that knows the difference between planning and committing
Three levers — rate, utilization, cost reduction — with a live preview of the gap impact. The commit button stays locked until a lever moves. When you're ready to act, the commitment screen asks for specific behavioral steps, not plans. The system tracks whether you kept them.
Rate architecture screen →
Who Sightline is for
Built exclusively for
interior design firm owners.
Not adapted from generic business software. Not a spreadsheet with better fonts. Built from scratch for the way a design firm actually works — project-based, team-dependent, time-sensitive, and consistently underpriced.
The solo principal
Running everything yourself
You're the designer, the project manager, and the business owner. Sightline gives you the financial clarity to price confidently and know whether the work you're doing is sustainable — without adding hours to your week.
The growing studio
Principal plus a small team
You've hired or are considering it. The firm's cost structure is more complex now, and the rate question is harder to answer. Sightline accounts for every team member's fully burdened cost and billable capacity so the rate reflects the whole firm.
The established firm
Multiple principals or teams
The firm has history, clients, and complexity. You need a financial picture that shows total firm capacity, budget revenue across all contributors, and project profitability that accounts for what each hour actually costs — not just what was quoted.
Pricing
Simple, transparent,
built for design firms.
Two tiers. No per-seat fees. No feature-gating that makes the product useless until you upgrade. Founding firm pricing available now while early access spots remain.
Sightline
For the solo principal
Rate architecture, project profitability tracking, capacity planning, and the action engine — everything a solo designer needs to run a financially clear firm.
$69
/month
Founding firm rate: $39/mo while spots remain
✓Aligned rate calculation with full layer breakdown
✓Real-time project margin tracking
✓Capacity timeline — 16-week pressure chart
✓Personalized action engine
✓Model a change + commit to action
✓Rate history and change tracking
✓Knowledge base — 8 in-depth guides
Practice — Most complete
For the studio with a team
Everything in Sightline, plus multi-principal support, full team capacity tracking, per-member utilization, budget revenue across all contributors, and the full team cost breakdown.
$129
/month
Founding firm rate: $79/mo while spots remain
✓Everything in Sightline
✓Multi-principal compensation support
✓Team capacity cards — per-member tracking
✓Budget revenue across all billable contributors
✓Fully burdened team cost breakdown
✓Team hours tile + email reminder
✓Per-member utilization table
Founding firm pricing is available to the first 100 firms. When spots are gone, the rate returns to standard pricing. Founding firms lock their rate permanently — it never increases as long as the subscription is active. Early access is open now.
Early access
Your firm.
Finally clear.
If you've ever finished a fully booked year wondering where the money went — Sightline was built for you. Join the waitlist for early access and founding firm pricing before the first 100 spots are gone.
No credit card required · Founding firm rate locked on signup
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