What Does It Really Cost to Quote a CNC Part by Hand?

Manual quoting feels free. Nobody sends you an invoice for it, so it never shows up as a line on a cost sheet. But it isn’t free — it’s one of the more expensive things a small shop does, precisely because the cost is hidden. Let’s make it visible.

The four costs of a hand-built quote

1. The estimator’s time. Start with the obvious one. A non-trivial CNC part takes one to three hours to quote properly by hand: open the model, read the drawing, look up feeds and speeds, work out cycle and setup time, price the material, roll it up, build the document. Put your estimator’s fully-loaded hourly cost against that. Then multiply by how many RFQs you quote a week — including the ones you don’t win.

That last point matters: you pay the quoting cost on every RFQ, but you only earn on the ones you win. If you quote ten jobs to win three, the quoting cost of the seven you lost is loaded onto those three.

2. The jobs you lose by being slow. This is the big one, and it’s the one shops underestimate most. When a buyer sends the same RFQ to four shops, the one that replies first and cleanest often wins before the others have opened the file. Every hour your quote sits unwritten is an hour a faster competitor is closing the job. The cost here isn’t the quoting time — it’s the gross margin of the work you never got to make.

3. The margin you leak to inconsistency. Quote the same part twice, by hand, on two different days — or via two different estimators — and you’ll get two different numbers. Sometimes you quote high and lose a job you’d have wanted. Sometimes you quote low and win a job that barely breaks even. Both directions cost money, quietly, on every quote.

4. The opportunity cost. The person who quotes well is usually one of your most experienced people — exactly the person whose attention is most valuable on the shop floor, on a tricky setup, or with a key customer. Every afternoon they spend on quoting arithmetic is an afternoon not spent on the things only they can do.

Add those four up honestly and “free” looks very different. For most shops, the salary line is the smallest of the four.

A simple way to put a number on it

You don’t need a complicated model. A back-of-the-envelope version:

(RFQs per week) × (hours per quote) × (loaded hourly cost) = visible quoting cost

Then add the part you can feel but not invoice: the jobs lost to slow turnaround, and the margin spread from inconsistent pricing. For a shop quoting, say, fifteen RFQs a week at two hours each, the visible cost alone is thirty estimator-hours a week — most of a full-time person doing nothing but quoting. The invisible costs are usually larger.

That’s the real price of quoting by hand. It’s just never written down.

What automation actually reclaims

The case for automating quoting isn’t “replace the estimator.” It’s “stop paying the four costs above.” Here’s what changes:

• The afternoon becomes about a minute. From a STEP file and a 2D drawing, the reading, the lookups, the cycle-time arithmetic and the document assembly collapse into roughly sixty seconds of compute. The visible time cost largely disappears.
• Replies go out the same day. Often within minutes — so you stop losing winnable jobs to a faster competitor.
• Pricing is consistent. A deterministic engine prices the same part the same way every time, from your shop’s own numbers. The margin leak from inconsistency closes.
• Your best people get their time back. The toil moves to the software; the judgement stays with the estimator, who reviews the breakdown and owns the final price.

Notice what doesn’t change: you still decide. The software hands you a transparent, line-by-line estimate built from your machines, materials and rates — you adjust anything you want and send it under your branding. The intelligence does the reading; a deterministic engine does the pricing; you do the judging.

The honest bottom line

Quoting by hand was never free — it was just unbilled. Once you put a real number on the estimator hours, the lost jobs and the inconsistent margin, the question stops being “can we afford to change how we quote?” and becomes “can we afford not to?”

If quoting is the bottleneck in your shop — the thing that’s always rushed, always behind, always done by the one person who can’t be spared — that’s the number worth working out.