Quote custom work the way a real shop costs it — whether you make printed boxes, machined parts, control panels, or furniture: material with a scrap buffer, setup amortized across the lot, run time at your shop rate, outside processing on the right basis, overhead, and an honest margin. Free, no signup — your numbers stay in your browser.
Enter a part's costs and get a real quote — setup amortized across the lot, subcontract included.
| Lot | Setup/pc | Price/pc |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $170.00 | $1,978.33 |
| 10 | $17.00 | $234.75 |
| 25 | $6.80 | $118.51 |
| 50 | $3.40 | $79.77 |
| 100 | $1.70 | $60.39 |
| 250 | $0.68 | $48.77 |
| 500 | $0.34 | $44.90 |
Small runs carry the whole setup cost on a few parts — which is why quoting one flat per-part price loses money on short lots.
This quote assumed you're tracking material, labor, and subcontract by hand. Fabbric turns a quote like this into a live BOM, job, and PO automatically — and remembers your shop's rates.
See how Fabbric works →Free · no signup to use the calculator.
Pricing a made-to-order project isn't guesswork, but it isn't a single number either. A good quote is built from four cost buckets — material, labor, outside processing, and overhead — and then marked up to the margin your business needs to stay healthy. Get any one of them wrong and you either lose the project or lose money on it. Here's how each piece works.
Start with what the raw material actually costs to make this part — not just the unit price, but the quantity you have to buy. If a finished piece uses a portion of a sheet, a coil, a roll of stock, or a billet, you're paying for what you buy, not only what ends up in the part. Factor in your yield and add a scrap allowance for the material that becomes offcuts and waste. On short runs, don't forget minimum purchases: if you have to buy a full sheet, roll, or bar to make three pieces, that whole quantity is a project cost.
There are two very different kinds of time in every project, and mixing them up is the most common quoting mistake.
Setup time is a fixed cost per lot — programming, tooling, plate or die setup, fixturing, and first-article checks happen once whether you run 10 pieces or 1,000. Run time is a variable cost per piece — it repeats for every unit.
The key move is amortizing setup across the lot. Two hours of setup on a 10-piece run adds a punishing amount to each piece; spread across 500 it nearly disappears. This is exactly why small runs cost more per piece, and why quoting the same per-piece price regardless of quantity will burn you on the small jobs. Multiply your run time by a rate that already absorbs equipment and facility overhead — or track those separately — but be consistent about which.
Printing, plating, coating, heat treat, finishing, testing, decoration — anything you send out is a real line item, and it comes with a trap: most outside processors charge lot minimums. A vendor's $75 minimum on a 5-piece run is $15 per piece; on a 200-piece run it's under 40 cents. Just like setup, subcontract cost per piece changes dramatically with quantity, so it has to be amortized the same way. Businesses that bury outside processing in a rough "add 15%" guess routinely under-quote small lots and over-quote large ones.
Once you have your direct cost per piece, apply overhead, then price for profit. Here's where real money gets left on the table: markup and margin are not the same thing. Markup is calculated on your cost; margin is calculated on your selling price. A 30% markup only yields about a 23% margin. If you think you're making 30% but you're actually keeping 23%, that gap is your profit quietly walking out the door on every job. Decide which target your business runs on and price accordingly.
None of these calculations are difficult. The problem is doing them consistently, for every quote, while also running the business — and then keeping track of which quotes turned into orders, which materials and rates you used, and what you actually made. That's the point where a spreadsheet stops keeping up.
Fabbric turns a quote like this into a live BOM, job, and purchase order — and remembers your rates, materials, and subcontract partners so you're not rebuilding the math from scratch on the next RFQ.
Yes — free, no signup, no trial clock. It runs entirely in your browser; your numbers never leave your computer unless you leave your details to download the quote PDF.
Markup is a percentage added to cost; margin is the share of the selling price that's profit. A 35% markup on a $100 cost gives a $135 price — but that's only a 26% margin. Quoting with the wrong one silently underprices your work, which is why the calculator lets you pick.
Setup is a one-time cost per lot. On 500 parts it nearly disappears; on 5 parts it can dominate the price. The Setup Spread table shows exactly how your price/part falls as the lot grows.
Enter each outside operation the way your vendor charges it — some charge per lot (a minimum-charge foil-stamping or anodize batch), some per piece. The calculator handles both bases at once, which is where spreadsheet quotes usually go wrong.