Sheet metal quoting software, and where fab quotes leak.

A fab quote lives or dies on the sheet. Not on the finished weight of the part, which is the number the model hands you, but on how much material you actually have to buy to get that part out. Get the nest wrong and no amount of care on the labor side saves the job.

I owned and ran a machine shop for the better part of a decade before I built software for one. Fabrication has its own version of the same problem I lived with: the estimating judgment is the valuable part, and it's the part that gets the least time, because everything around it is manual.

What actually belongs in a fabrication quote

• Material as consumed, not as delivered. Yield off the sheet, the skeleton you throw away, and whether the part nests well with the rest of the order or sits awkwardly on its own sheet. A part that nests at high utilization and the same part quoted off its own weight are two different prices.
• Cutting, by the thing that actually drives it. Cut length and pierce count, with material and thickness setting the speed. Piercing is where thick plate quietly eats the clock, and a part with forty holes is not the same job as a part with four.
• Forming, by complexity and not just bend count. Eight simple bends on a flat panel is not eight bends on a box that has to be handled twice, or a form that needs a special punch and die, or a bend that puts the part out of reach of one operator.
• Hardware and inserts. Self-clinching hardware is fast per piece and slow in aggregate, and it's the line most often left off entirely.
• Welding, in inches and in setup. Weld length, process, position, and whether the assembly needs a fixture built before anyone strikes an arc. The fixture is real money and it belongs somewhere on the quote.
• Deburr, grind and finish prep. Pure labor, invisible on the model, and the first thing forgotten on a part that has to look good.
• Outside finishing, with its lead time attached. Powder coat, plating, anodize, passivation. The cost matters and so does the fact that somebody else's queue can be most of your delivery promise.
• Packaging and freight. Small until the part is large, thin, or easy to bend in transit, and then not small at all.

Where fab quotes go wrong most often

• Pricing material off part weight. The single most common leak in this trade. The customer's part weighs what it weighs; you bought a sheet.
• Not re-pricing when the metal moves. A quote built on last quarter's coil price, honored this quarter, is a decision nobody consciously made.
• Under-quoting secondary labor. Deburr, hardware, grinding. Each one is small and none of them are optional, so the total is never small.
• Not feeding actuals back. The job runs long, the floor knows it ran long, and the estimator never hears. The same part gets quoted off the same wrong number next quarter, every time it comes back.
• Answering late. The first credible quote on a buyer's desk gets the attention. Take a week and you're quoting against somebody who already answered.

What I will not do: guess your cut and form times

Worth saying early, because it decides whether I'm any use to you.

There are platforms that read a flat pattern and tell you how long it takes to cut and bend. If that's what you're shopping for, buy one, and I mean that plainly. Your speeds depend on your machine, your nozzle and lens condition, your gas, your material supplier, your tooling and your operator. A number from somebody else's assumptions is a number 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, and matches on your part number even when the customer calls it something else. That's recall, not prediction. It can't be wrong the way an estimate can be wrong.

What a right-sized quoting tool does

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, descriptions, 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, the part that needs someone who knows the work. Before a quote goes out, the system checks every line carries the costs it's supposed to, so the deburr line and the hardware line don't quietly leave at zero.

Your nesting logic, your yield assumptions, your machine rates, your finish vendors and their lead times: that's the part that gets 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.

What it doesn't do

• It's faster than the system it replaced. That's the honest claim. I'm not handing you a percentage, because I didn't measure one.
• It doesn't nest for you. If you run nesting software, that's where nesting belongs and the quote reads your assumptions rather than re-inventing them.
• Reading past actuals needs a system that holds them. That lookup is proven against JobBOSS. Anywhere else is a connector question I'll answer straight rather than promise here.
• It's only as good as the request. A clean RFQ extracts well. A blurry scan still needs a person, and the system flags it rather than guessing.
• It uses an LLM to read requests and drawings. A per-use or monthly cost. Small, but real, and you should know before you sign anything.

What it costs

A paid Diagnostic first, mapping how your quoting actually runs today. Then a Build priced up front, so you know the number before it starts, 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.

Common questions

We already run nesting software. Does this replace it?

No. Nesting is its own discipline and you've already solved it. The quoting tool takes your yield assumptions as an input rather than pretending to redo the work.

We do fab and machining both. Does that complicate it?

It's normal, and it's a reason generic software struggles. Two trades price differently and the tool has to carry both sets of logic without one of them being an afterthought. The machining note is here.

Will this replace my estimator?

No. Their judgment on routing and costing 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 most of what you sell, see laser cutting quoting and waterjet quoting. A quote is only as good as what the last one really took, which is why those numbers often aren't trusted, and when the quote becomes an order the next gap is usually POs keyed in by hand.