Price a new CNC or machine shop job from material, setup, cycle time, and margin. Shows the price per part, total job price, setup payoff quantity, and exports a clean PDF quote with your shop name at the top.
Every shop owner has a story about a job they quoted too low. Usually the story runs the same. A good customer calls, the quantity looks reasonable, the setup felt familiar, you wrote a number on a sticky note and emailed it back. Six weeks later the job runs and you realize the cycle time was off, material went up, and the margin you thought you were making never existed. This calculator won't save you from optimistic cycle times. Nothing will. But it will at least make sure you've charged for all the things you should charge for in the estimate you're working with.
The math is deliberately simple. Material cost per part, setup time amortized across the run, cycle time at your loaded shop rate, consumables, scrap allowance, then a margin on top. That's it. No CAD upload, no AI, no pretending it knows more about your shop than you do. It's a cocktail napkin quote that makes sure you haven't dropped a zero or forgotten to include setup.
Material cost per part.What you'll actually pay your distributor, not the catalog price from six months ago. Round up if you're guessing. Steel and aluminum prices move, and the gap comes out of your margin. Include waste if you're buying stock to a length the part doesn't fully consume.
Setup time.Honest setup. Pull tooling, load the program, indicate the first part, debug the first article. Most shops undercount this by 30 to 50 percent. Setup is one time, but it gets divided across the whole run, so on small quantities it's often the biggest cost per part.
Cycle time per part.Run time for one complete part. Drop load and unload if you're running attended and don't want to count operator time twice. If you're quoting off a drawing and don't know the real cycle time, use the cycle time helper below or check your tooling vendor's charts. For anything over $1,000 in revenue, quote the first article at your estimate and true it up on the second.
Quantity.Quantity is what amortizes setup. Twenty parts is a totally different price than two hundred parts at the same cycle time, because the per part setup share is ten times smaller at 200. The calculator does the division for you, but the insight is worth spelling out. If a customer asks you to quote a quantity that feels too small, it's because the setup per part is going to dominate and they're not going to like the number.
Shop rate.Your loaded hourly rate. Labor plus machine plus overhead, not just wages. If you came here from the shop rate calculator it's already filled in. If you don't know your shop rate cold, calculate that first. Quoting at $65/hour when your real cost is $85/hour is the fastest way to lose money while looking busy.
Target margin.Default is 20 percent. Industry articles cite 15 to 25 percent as normal for small machine shops. Below 15 you have no buffer for a bad quarter. Above 25 and you're probably too expensive for commodity work. The right number depends on how much competition you have and how captive the customer is.
The setup payoff number tells you how many parts you need to run before the margin you earn covers the setup cost you already sunk. Below that quantity you're running to cover setup. Above it you're earning real margin. It's the cleanest way to see whether a small run is actually worth taking at your quoted price.
If the calculator says your setup doesn't pay back until 45 parts and the customer wants 30, you have three options. Raise the price until payoff hits 25. Negotiate a higher minimum. Or decline the job. Running it at the original price means paying the customer to use your shop floor, which is rarely a good trade.
Full CAD based quoting software (Toolpath, DigiFabster, QuoteCAM) is real and it works for shops that run high volume, have a consistent machine mix, and can afford $300 to $1,000 a month in subscriptions. Small job shops running one off and low volume work usually find the upload and wait workflow slower than writing a number on a sticky note, and the estimates are often wrong on small quantities because setup dominates and setup is hard to estimate from geometry.
This calculator is the opposite. Fast, transparent, and it trusts you to know your own shop. You type six numbers, see the math, adjust, and send the number back to the customer. The point isn't to replace your judgment. It's to make sure you haven't forgotten setup, underpriced material, or applied zero margin because you were in a hurry.
The optional cycle time helper takes tool diameter, cutting speed (SFM or m/min), chip load, and flutes, and gives you spindle RPM, feed rate, and cutting time for a given length of cut. The formulas are the basic ones every machinist learns. RPM equals (SFM times 12) divided by (pi times diameter) for imperial. Feed rate equals chip load times flutes times RPM. Cutting time equals length divided by feed rate. These are starting points, not the answer. For real speeds and feeds use G-Wizard, FSWizard, or your tooling vendor's data. The helper is here so you don't have to leave the page to ballpark a new part.
If you're running commodity work. Simple parts, lots of competition, customers who shop on price. You need to be tight on the math and honest about your utilization. Running at 80 percent capacity with a $72/hour break-even means $78/hour is a viable quote. If you're running specialty work. Tight tolerance, short lead times, unusual materials, customers who need delivery more than they need the cheapest price. You can charge your real target rate with confidence, and you should. Most shops that quote too low do it out of habit, not because the competition actually demands it.
Free tool from swarf.shop. No email, no signup, no catch. We build job tracking software for small machine shops — these calculators are stuff we needed ourselves.