Mold shop quoting tool. Priced quotes for your top-volume part type, in 30 days.
Quoting lives in one estimator's head. They open the CAD file, walk the cavity geometry by feel, pull pricing assumptions from a personal spreadsheet, and build a line-item PDF in Excel. Quotes take 2 to 5 days. Faster shops win the job.
It starts when an RFQ for the pilot part type lands.
The moment that kicks off the workflow. Today this is the email someone reads, the call someone takes, the document someone walks across the office. The tool replaces the human router.
4 steps. The tool handles them.
- 01
We encode the formula
Pilot weeks 1 to 2: we sit with the estimator and pull the pricing logic for your highest-volume part type out of the workbook (and out of their head) into one structured input form.
- 02
Estimator enters part inputs
Material, quantity, key dimensions for that part type. One form, your own pricing logic running underneath. No new pricing model to learn.
- 03
Estimator confirms the line-item math
The tool produces the priced lines instantly. Estimator reviews, adjusts for anything unusual, signs off.
- 04
Branded PDF goes to the customer
Line-item pricing, customer-ready, branded to your shop. Same-day instead of 2 to 5.
30-day proof.
The pilot starts with one part type, the one you quote most often. The first 2 to 3 weeks of the engagement, we sit with the estimator and pull the pricing logic out of their head and the workbook into the tool's input form. By day 30, quotes on that part type go out the same day they come in. That alone usually frees a couple of hours a day for the estimator on the most repetitive work in the shop.
From there it grows. On the monthly, the next tool layers in your second-highest-volume part family, then a third. Eventually the full pattern includes CAD-image upload with the drawing embedded in the customer PDF, a historical quote lookup that pulls precedents in seconds, and a workflow that lets a junior estimator run routine quotes independently. That destination is what the Solutions Library entry describes. The pilot is the first brick.
Your monthly is flat once the pilot graduates onto Starter. Small refinements to the running tool stay included. Adding the next part family is a new tool that we tell you about openly before we build it. Most shops grow into Growth or Scale tier over the first year as they retire spreadsheets one workflow at a time.
$800 pilot: priced quote PDFs for your highest-volume part type. 1 to 3 weeks to build, 30 days live. After the pilot, the engagement graduates onto Starter ($295/mo). The tool grows from there as you add part families and capabilities.
Where this build fits, where it does not.
This fits discrete-parts manufacturing shops that price off encoded logic (per-material, per-operation, per-customer rules in Excel or in your estimator's head). Mold shops, metal fabricators, CNC machining shops, custom assembly, sheet-metal, plastics, primary metals, printing, custom electrical. It does not fit shops where every quote is research and development from scratch, where pricing is genuinely intuitive rather than rule-based, or where you have no working pricing workbook to start from.
Why custom, not off-the-shelf.
A 25-person shop with a working ERP, a working QuickBooks, and ten years of quote history in PDFs and Excel does not need a platform. It needs a quoting layer that reads what you already have, captures your estimator's actual pricing logic, and is live in 18 days for the cost of a single month on an off-the-shelf vertical quoting platform.
The off-the-shelf options for this workflow
- Vertical CAD-driven quoting platformsBuilt around uploaded CAD and 3D files. Pricing starts around $1,500 per month plus per-quote fees. If your shop quotes mostly from 2D drawings, RFQ emails, or historical jobs, you pay for analyzers you cannot feed.
- Full fab-shop ERP suitesThey include quoting, but to get it you replace your existing ERP, retrain the office for three months, and rebuild every integration. Quoting becomes one feature in a platform you bought to fix one feature.
- Budget small-manufacturing platformsAround $49 per user per month and up. You have to model every routing, BOM, and operation in their data shape up front. Shops with ten years of messy real-world quote data find the configuration burden bigger than the quoting headache.
When the off-the-shelf option is the right call
A vertical CAD-driven platform makes sense for an aerospace or precision-machining shop already running CAD-driven workflows. A full fab-shop ERP makes sense when your ERP is end-of-life anyway. ByteQuix fits the shop in between: working systems, custom pricing logic, no developer on staff.
Built on top of what you already run.
The pilot reads your existing Excel pricing workbook for the pilot part type and runs the encoded formula behind one structured input form. No ERP integration in the pilot. No CAD upload yet. As the tool grows on the monthly, CAD-image upload, historical quote lookup, and optional ERP write-back for job-folder consistency get layered in one tool at a time.
Specific questions buyers ask about this build.
What does the $800 pilot actually deliver, exactly?
One specific outcome: a working priced-quote PDF generator for your single highest-volume part type, encoded from your existing Excel pricing logic. By day 30, quote turnaround on that part type goes from 2 to 5 days to same-day. That is the proof. From there, the engagement graduates onto the monthly and we add the next part family, then CAD upload, then the historical view, one tool at a time.
My pricing logic isn't fully in Excel. Some of it is in the estimator's head.
That is the typical starting point. The first 2 to 3 weeks of the pilot, we sit with the estimator and pull the head-knowledge into the encoded rules for the pilot part type. By the end of the pilot, the Excel and the head-knowledge are the same workbook for that part type, and both are running through the tool.
What happens to my estimator's role?
Estimators move from typing to judging. As more part families graduate into the tool over the months, the routine 80 percent of quotes run in minutes and they spend their hours on the unusual 20 percent that need real expertise. Estimator output goes up; estimator burnout goes down.
Will the monthly nickel-and-dime me?
Your monthly is flat. Small refinements to a running tool are included. Adding a new part family or a brand-new capability is a new tool, and we tell you about it openly before we build it. Most clients stay at their starting tier, and that is fine with us.
See more manufacturing builds.
This build fits other operations in the same industry, with their own outcomes and metrics.
Manufacturing industry hub →Manufacturer Quoting in Excel? A Decision Framework
Most small manufacturers still quote in Excel. Most do not need to. Here are the four signs that say it is time to replace the spreadsheet, and what comes after.
Read the field note →