Guides / Operating gaps
Cut length and pierce count are the easy part. The hard part is knowing what an hour on that machine actually costs you, and quoting so the sheet, the gas and the consumables all land on the invoice. Written by someone who quoted this work for a living, not by a software company.
Most laser quotes are built on two numbers: how long the head is moving, and a machine rate somebody picked a few years ago and nobody has revisited since. The first number is usually close to right. The second one is where the money goes missing.
I owned and ran a machine shop for the better part of a decade before I built software for one. The pattern is the same wherever there's an expensive machine in the middle of the quote: the run time gets scrutinized and the rate gets inherited.
An hourly rate that was set when the machine was new, before the current gas contract, before the last maintenance agreement, and before power prices moved, is not a rate. It's a habit. And because it multiplies every single quote that touches that machine, it's the number that moves the most money in the building and the one nobody owns.
Working out your own is not complicated, it's just tedious, and it's exactly the kind of thing that gets postponed forever. I wrote up the same exercise for a different machine, and the method transfers directly: working out your wire EDM cost per hour. Swap the consumables and the logic holds.
There are platforms that read a flat pattern and tell you how long it will take on your machine. If that's what you're shopping for, buy one, and I mean that without any edge on it. Cut speed depends on your machine, its power, your nozzle and window condition, your gas, your material supplier and your operator. A number built on somebody else's assumptions is one your people won't stand behind, and the first time it's wrong on a real order it stops being trusted at all.
What I'll do instead is stop your estimator re-deriving what you already know. In the build running in production today, when a part number comes up the tool reads what that part actually took on the jobs that have already run it, operation by operation, out of the ERP, matching on your part number even when the customer calls it something different. That's recall, not prediction, and it can't be wrong the way an estimate can be wrong.
Requests land in a shared mailbox and that arrival is the trigger. The system reads what it can out of the request and the attached drawings: quantities, part numbers, material and gauge, finish callouts. It does the reading, extracting and typing so the estimator doesn't.
From there it's their call. They set the routing and the costing. Before a quote leaves, the system checks that every line carries the costs it's supposed to, so the gas line and the handling line don't quietly go out at zero.
Your machine rates, your gas costs, your material families, your utilization assumptions, your minimum charges: that's the part built around how you do it. Most of a quoting tool is the same wherever it goes and is already built. The part that isn't is your pricing, and the build is sized to that.
A paid Diagnostic first, mapping how your quoting actually runs today. Then a Build priced up front, scoped to the part that's specific to you. I host and run it on managed infrastructure that works on top of the systems you already use, with an ongoing care plan after that keeps it running: hosting, monitoring, fixes and small adjustments as your work changes. Term and price by agreement. No hourly meter and no per-seat license.
Request intake and extraction, the history lookup that reads what a part actually ran, the completeness check before a quote can leave, and the auto-filing that keeps requests, drawings and finished quotes from getting lost. Deployed and running for a mid-size manufacturer.
See what I’ve shipped →It changes what matters. Contract cutting lives on turnaround and on minimum charges, so the intake speed and the consistency of the minimum are worth more to you than deep routing logic. That's a smaller build, and it should be priced like one.
Common, and the two price differently enough that one set of logic won't serve both honestly. The waterjet note is here.
No. Their judgment is the part that wins or loses money. The tool takes the reading, extracting and typing off their plate and checks the quote is complete before it goes out.
Related. The general case is quoting software specced to how you actually quote. If cutting is one step of a bigger job, see sheet metal and fabrication quoting. A quote is only as good as what the last one really took, which is why those numbers often aren't trusted.
First call's free. About 30 minutes, a straight conversation about how your quoting actually runs today, from request to PO, not a demo. If a right-sized build is worth doing, I'll say so. If you're better off with something off the shelf, I'll say that too.