Pricing and Quotes

Selective Automatic Quoting

Automatic Quoting is exactly what you're hoping for, allowing customers to instantly purchase parts based on things like setup cost, material usage, print time, and post-processing — all of which can be automated. We'll be diving into all of that here. But first, let's talk about how you can be selective about it, as you might not want to show an instant price for everything.

Instant vs Manual Price

An instant priceA price that is automatically shown to the client without staff review. Enables instant checkout and streamlines order placement, but may increase risk for complex or unexpected jobs. is shown to the customer immediately, allowing them to place an order without any manual review. This has major advantages: customers can complete their own orders without delay, and your team saves time and money by removing the quoting process entirely. However, it does come with risks, as you may occasionally receive a project that proves difficult or unprofitable to fulfill. While the platform supports a smooth reject/refund workflow for such cases, relying on it frequently can be problematic.

For that reason, more complex or variable requests — like custom paint — are better suited for a manual quoteA price reviewed and approved by staff before it is shown to the client. Used for complex or custom work that cannot be reliably auto-quoted.. These situations require a human review before pricing is shown.

Let’s look at how to limit models for manual review next.

Limiting Materials/Sizes

Click Choose Automatically-Quoted Materials & Sizes, and you'll see how you can limit which materials are automatically quoted based on the machine they can fit onto. For example, PLA might be automatically quoted regardless of the size, so you would select your largest machine. Meanwhile, polycarbonate might be limited to smaller machines with enclosures, so you would select a smaller machine that can handle polycarbonate, preventing customers from seeing an instant price on larger models.

Or, if you want to apply a rule across the board (vs. specific material and machine combinations), you'll see the radio buttons allowing you to do so. Enabling them will give you more options to customize the quoting behavior.

Volume/Bounding Box Ratio

This option is generally used for powder-based machines, which often put a high value on the volume of the part. However, if a situation comes up where a part has very little volume but takes up a large bounding box, you might want to require it to be manually reviewed.

Limiting Properties

A propertyAnything about a model that isn't the technology or material (layer height, infill, post processing, etc.). is anything other than the technology and material, and some would very likely trigger a manual review. For example, custom paint would likely require a manual review. All pricing for properties takes place within the user interface of the property itself, as it would be too cumbersome otherwise.

To edit or restrict pricing for a specific property:

1. Go to Materials & Capabilities
2. Select Technology
3. Click the Properties tab
4. Click the Settings for the property (gear icon)
5. Click Edit for the specific property option (pencil icon)

Pricing

Price Previews

To get started with pricing, go to the bottom right corner and click Show Price Previews:

This pops out a drawer that will be essential for the next steps. It will reference any project you would like, and all of the files from that project will be shown here. Any changes you make to the pricing will be immediately reflected in the price preview, in real time, and at various QTYs (1, 5, 10, 50, and 100).

With that, create a project that has a lot of different models at a lot of different sizes and shapes (to give you a good idea of how your changes will affect a wide array of things). Then, at the top of the Show Price Previews drawer, click the pencil icon to enter the name of the project you just created:

Once you have done that, all of the models from that project will be shown in the price preview, and you're ready to dive in.

Pro Tip

Open up the project that this preview button is referencing in another tab so that you can adjust the properties for the models to reflect what you're currently working on. For example, if you're working on PLA pricing, you would make all of the parts in that project PLA.

Manage Expectations

We’re incredibly proud of the quoting system we’ve built — it’s more advanced, flexible, and transparent than anything else we’ve seen in this space. That said, it’s important to remember that no system can achieve absolute perfection on every model. Each part is different, and technicians often use advanced slicing techniques to produce them (e.g., advanced support structures, adaptive speed modifiers, etc.). With that, perfection isn’t the goal — consistency and logic are.

If you notice that print times, material usage, or other estimates aren’t perfect on a case-by-case basis, don’t be discouraged. Rather, keep your eye on the big picture presented in the price previews. Focus on your pricing logic across a wide range of model types, and make sure you're comfortable with the price for each of them at the various quantities. The goal is to get to a balanced and fair price structure overall.

We also encourage you to embrace all applicable pricing factors — even ones you may have previously ignored. The platform is capable of modeling complexity far beyond what’s possible in Excel. If you try to recreate your previous pricing model while neglecting to use some factors, you may overemphasize the remaining ones, which exaggerates their impact when they aren’t perfect. By configuring all available factors, you spread that complexity across the board, allowing the system to produce more accurate pricing overall.

Setup Cost

The setup cost covers tasks like analysis, slicing, and other preparation work. It’s applied once per model, regardless of quantity. In other words, the setup cost to make a quantity of 1 is the same as the setup cost to make a quantity of 100 for that same model. For this reason, in the price preview section, you’ll see that the setup cost per part becomes dramatically lower as the total quantity increases — it’s simply dividing the one-time setup cost by the number of parts being produced.

Material Cost

Each part’s volume is multiplied by its material’s density and price to calculate the material cost. You can optionally set a Printing Difficulty multiplier to account for consistently higher or lower material usage. For example, if a material has a 50% failure rate (meaning you effectively use twice as much material), you can set that material’s print difficulty multiplier to 2. Alternatively, the Printing Difficulty multiplier can also be used as a way to increase the price of certain materials without directly adjusting their material cost values.

Support density, if applicable, can be adjusted in the advanced settings. Behind the scenes, the software is rotating the model to find the best orientation, and then estimating the supports accordingly.

Print Time Cost

Each part’s estimated print time is multiplied by its technology’s rate to calculate the print time cost. For this to be accurate, you’ll want to adjust the print speed setting for each technology accordingly. Refer to the price previews drawer to ensure that different models of various sizes are calculated within a generally accurate range.

Pro Tip

For filament technologies, a lot happens behind the scenes. The system takes into account layer height, nozzle size (default is 0.4 mm unless changed), infill percentage, and even support generation based on the support density set in the material cost advanced settings. While these parameters aren’t adjusted in this section directly, price previews will update in real time as those values are modified in their respective areas.

You’ll also notice an option to set packing efficiency, sometimes referred to in the industry as nesting. This represents the ability to print multiple parts together on the same machine. With resin and powder-based technologies, the efficiency gains from nesting can be significant. Adjusting this value allows you to pass that efficiency on to your customers in the form of improved bulk pricing, as it relates to print time.

Finally, you can apply machine-specific print time multipliers. As explained in the Selective Automatic Quoting section, the software first looks for machines approved to run a specific material. It then assumes you're using the smallest suitable machine available (e.g., choosing a Bambu P1S before a Prusa XL). As part size increases, the system will automatically move up to the next compatible machine. For those larger machines, the machine-specific multiplier takes effect — allowing you to charge a higher rate per hour for bigger, more expensive equipment.

Cleaning Cost

This represents the cost of post-processing each part. An estimated cleaning time is calculated and then multiplied by the cleaning rate you've specified. If the estimated cleaning time tends to be inaccurate, you can fine-tune it by adjusting the cleaning difficulty value for each material. Refer to the price previews drawer to see how this affects the overall price.

How it Works

Cleaning cost is one of the most difficult things to estimate accurately. In brief, the software considers the part’s surface area and the amount of support material used. It also takes into account the printing technology—whether it’s filament, resin, or powder—and uses this context to estimate a realistic cleaning time.

Pro Tip

You can use Bulk Discounts to apply a percentage-based discount at higher quantities, assuming labor gets more efficient with larger quantities.

Pricing Properties

As mentioned above, pricing propertiesAnything about a model that isn't the technology or material (layer height, infill, post processing, etc.). is managed within the user interface of the property itself (not on the page you're currently viewing).

Note

Infill, layer height, and nozzle size are properties that are automatically taken into account for their relevant technologies, such as filament-based processes. All other properties — especially any custom ones you create — need to be priced manually.

To price your properties:

1. Go to Materials & Capabilities
2. Select the Technology
3. Click the Properties tab
4. Click the Settings icon for the property (gear icon)
5. Click Edit for the specific property option (pencil icon)

From there, you can set either a fixed dollar adjustment or a percentage-based price increase.

For example, if your property is Install Inserts, and each option represents a quantity (e.g., 1, 2, 3, etc.), you might assign a specific dollar value to each QTY option.

Or, if you offer a smoothing operation, you may prefer to increase the total price by 10% when it's selected.

Again, all of this is configured through the property’s own user interface (not on the Pricing and Quotes page we're currently reviewing).

Bulk Discounts

In addition to nesting-based efficiencies (see Packing Efficiency), the system also allows you to apply straightforward quantity-based bulk discounts. This lets you offer customers a reduced price as the quantity ordered increases — regardless of how the parts are physically arranged in the build.

Refer to the price previews drawer to see how these discounts affect the overall price at various quantities.

How It Works

For each technology, you can define specific quantity breakpoints and corresponding discount percentages. These values represent how much of the normal cost will be charged at each quantity level. This creates a smooth discount curve that rewards customers for ordering in larger batches.

Applying Discounts Selectively

You can apply the discount across the board by checking all of the corresponding boxes for Setup, Cleaning, Material, and Time.

Or, you can choose to apply it selectively — for example, only to Material and Time, while preserving the full rate for Setup and Cleaning.

This gives you flexibility to protect fixed labor costs, while still offering incentives on the more scalable components of your pricing model.

Lead Time Estimation

Lead Time Overview

Lead time estimations are shown to staff members in all projects, as well as to clients if automatic quoting is available. These can be overwritten by staff on a case-by-case basis within a project. Each technology in a project has a lead time estimation, and the largest of these is used as the project's final lead time.

Estimation Strategy

For lead time estimation, the system offers three options—referred to as strategies: Price-Based, Capacity-Based, and Volume-Based.

We strongly recommend using the Price-Based strategy.

The reason is simple: if you've already fine-tuned your pricing to reflect the various factors involved in producing a model, you can typically establish accurate lead times based on the total price of a job. In contrast, both Capacity-Based and Volume-Based strategies tend to be significantly more complex to configure correctly—especially when dealing with multiple technologies.

Additionally, if your system is designed to accept orders instantly and at any time (which is often the whole point of using automated quoting), then it’s important to acknowledge that no lead time strategy can guarantee perfect accuracy. However, a Price-Based estimation generally provides the best balance of simplicity, control, and realism.

Price-Based Lead Times

The Price-Based lead time strategy allows you to estimate turnaround time based on pricing tiers. These tiers group total job prices into ranges, with each range linked to a specific lead time output.

For example, your tiers might look like this:

• $0–$100 → outputs 1–2 days
• $100–$500 → outputs 2–3 days
• $500–$2,000 → outputs 3–5 days
• $2,000–$5,000 → outputs 5–7 days
• $5,000+ → outputs 7–10 days

Each tier can use either a Fixed Range or a Linear Function:

• Fixed Range: Applies the same lead time across the entire tier. For example, whether a job is $510 or $1,950, it will return the 3–5 day lead time set for the $500–$2,000 tier.

• Linear Function: Gradually increases the lead time within the tier, based on the job price.
  For example, if the $500–$2,000 tier uses a linear function with a lead time range of 3–5 days, the system will interpolate lead time based on the order total:

  • A $500 job would return 3 days
  • A $1,250 job would return 4 days
  • A $2,000 job would return 5 days

This approach works particularly well when your pricing already reflects the complexity, size, and effort required for each model. It allows lead times to scale naturally with the job size, without having to manually configure timelines for every possible order.

Pro Tip

Use the + Add Tooltip button to cover edge cases, like large orders. Instead of setting an extremely long lead time, consider capping it at a reasonable value and adding a tooltip that explains:

“Lead time may be longer for orders of this size — we’ll reach out to confirm shortly.”

This helps manage expectations while keeping your lead times customer-friendly.

Capacity-Based Lead Time

The Capacity-Based strategy calculates lead time based on the estimated availability of your machines. It uses your current shop capacity, along with your defined ramp-up and efficiency settings, to estimate how long it will take to produce the job.

At the time of estimation, the system assumes:

• You can dedicate X% of your capacity to this job at the start (set in Production Share Ramp Start)
• You will ramp up to Y% of your capacity over time (set in Production Share Ramp End)
• That ramp-up will occur evenly across Z days (set in Production Share Ramp Length)

This gradually increasing allocation of capacity is then used to calculate a lead time based on the total print time of the job (as defined in your Print Time Cost settings).

Once that minimum lead time is estimated, the system adds a buffer defined by the Max Lead Time Inflation setting. For example, if the minimum is 3 business days and the inflation is 15%, the final range would be 3–3.45 days (rounded to business days where applicable).

You can also adjust Capacity Efficiency to reflect the overall performance of your shop. A value of 100% means machines are always running at full speed with no failures or downtime. Lower percentages reduce your effective throughput, simulating bottlenecks, maintenance, or inconsistent uptime.

Volume-Based Lead Time

The Volume-Based strategy estimates lead time based on the total amount of material volume (in cubic inches) used in the order. You’ll define one or more volume tiers, each tied to a specific lead time range. This is useful if your production times generally scale with the size of the part(s), regardless of price.

Setting up Volume Tiers

In the user interface, you can click “Add Range” to define multiple volume brackets. For each bracket, you’ll set a minimum and maximum volume range, and then choose how the system should estimate lead time within that range:

• Fixed Range: Returns a consistent lead time for any order that falls within the defined volume range.
  Example: A range of 0–100 in³ outputs 1–2 days, regardless of whether the part uses 10 in³ or 95 in³ of material.

• Linear Function: Gradually increases the lead time based on the material volume within the range.
  Example: A range of 100–1,000 in³ with a lead time of 2–5 days would:

  • Output 2 days for a 100 in³ job
  • Output 3.5 days for a 550 in³ job
  • Output 5 days for a 1,000 in³ job

You can add as many tiers as needed to reflect how different sizes of parts typically affect turnaround time.