AI Quoting for Job Shops and Custom Fabricators
Quote-AI reads the RFQ, applies your exact rates, and outputs a signed-ready quote before the customer moves on. Built for job shops, fab shops, and contract manufacturers who bid custom work every single day.
The Problem
Most custom manufacturers spend four to eight hours every week building quotes by hand. Many never get sent. Others go out inconsistent. A few get priced too low and cost you money to fulfill.
The average job shop owner spends half a working day per week on quoting tasks that could be handled automatically. Over a year, that is 200 hours that never touch a machine, never train a new hire, and never grow the business.
When quoting takes too long, low-priority RFQs fall off the pile. A third of incoming requests at small shops go unanswered, not because you said no, but because there was not enough time to price them honestly. That is revenue you never even had a shot at.
Inconsistent labor rate application, forgotten overhead line items, and missing setup charges compound over hundreds of orders. Shops that quote from memory routinely leave 8 to 15 percent margin on the table per job, according to survey data from the National Tooling and Machining Association.
How It Works
No training sessions. No configuration sprints. Upload the RFQ, review the output, send it. Quote-AI handles the extraction, the math, and the follow-up so you can stay on the floor.
Paste the customer email, upload a PDF, or forward the request directly to your Quote-AI inbox address. The AI reads part specs, quantities, material callouts, tolerances, and delivery dates without any manual data entry on your end.
Quote-AI generates a line-by-line quote using your saved labor rates by operation, your material markups, and your overhead factors. Review the draft in under two minutes. Adjust any line without losing the rest. Confirm when it looks right.
Send the branded PDF directly from the platform. Quote-AI logs the open event, sends an automatic follow-up at 48 hours if no response, and records the win or loss when the customer replies. Your pipeline is always current, with no manual logging.
Features
Quote-AI is purpose-built for custom manufacturers, not adapted from generic proposal software. Every feature exists because a shop owner asked for it by name.
Reads PDFs, email threads, Word documents, and image files. Extracts part numbers, quantities, material specs, tolerances, and delivery windows without any copy-paste from you.
Enter your labor rates by operation, turning, milling, welding, inspection, deburr. Set your material markups and overhead multipliers. Quote-AI applies them consistently every time, on every job, with no drift between estimators.
Every quote ships as a clean professional PDF with your logo, terms, validity period, and line-item breakdown. Customers can sign digitally and return the acceptance in one click. No printing, no scanning, no back-and-forth.
Set your preferred follow-up window, 24, 48, or 72 hours, and Quote-AI sends a brief professional check-in if the customer has not responded. You stay top-of-mind without playing phone tag or managing a reminder calendar.
See which customers win at which price points, which operations come up most often in RFQs, and where margin is leaking. A monthly close-out report tells you what to tighten and what is working.
Connect to JobBoss, Shoptech E2, or a simple Google Sheet. When a quote is accepted, the job drops automatically into your work order queue. No double entry, no missed handoffs to the floor.
"We went from four hours on quotes every Tuesday to maybe 25 minutes. That time went straight back to the floor. We also started responding to the smaller RFQs we used to ignore completely."
Rick Holvenstot, Owner, Midwest Precision Parts, Toledo OH
Who It Is For
Quote-AI is not a fit for high-volume commodity manufacturers running the same part on repeat. It is built for the shop that gets a different RFQ every morning and has to price each one from scratch before lunch.
Turning, milling, grinding, and multi-axis work. If your customers send drawings and you send quotes back, Quote-AI was designed around your exact workflow. Tolerances, material callouts, and per-piece pricing all parsed automatically.
CNC Turning CNC Milling Multi-Axis GrindingStructural steel, custom frames, sheet metal, and aluminum fab. Quote-AI handles linear foot and square foot pricing, material weight calculations, and per-pass welding rate application natively. No custom setup required.
Sheet Metal Structural Aluminum Fab WeldIf you take on work from OEMs and tier-one suppliers, Quote-AI keeps your history organized and your rates current so repeat business is quoted in seconds. Revision tracking means your customer always gets the latest version, never an old one you forgot to update.
OEM Supply Tier 2 Revision ControlWhy Quote-AI
Most quoting tools are built for agencies and service firms. They do not know what a setover is, what G-code costs, or why material yield matters. Quote-AI was built from the floor up for manufacturing.
| Capability | Quote-AI | Generic Proposal Tools | Manual Spreadsheet |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads manufacturing RFQs automatically | Yes | No | No |
| Labor rate by operation type | Yes | No | Manual setup |
| Material markup and overhead factors | Yes | Limited | Manual setup |
| Automatic follow-up sequencing | Yes | Some tools | No |
| Win rate and margin reporting | Yes | No | No |
| ERP handoff on acceptance | Yes | No | No |
| Setup time | Under 10 minutes | Days to weeks | Hours of formula work |
Pricing
Start free for 14 days. No credit card required. Cancel any month. All plans include the full feature set, unlimited support, and your complete quote history exportable at any time.
Solo Shop
$79
per month, cancel anytime
Shop Team
$149
per month, cancel anytime
Multi-Shop
$349
per month, cancel anytime
FAQ
During onboarding you fill out a one-page rate sheet: your hourly labor rates by operation, your standard material markups, and any shop overhead multipliers you apply. Quote-AI stores these as your defaults and applies them to every quote. You can override any specific line on any individual quote without touching your saved defaults.
PDF, Word documents, plain text emails, and image files (JPG, PNG, TIFF). The current release reads written specifications and callouts. STEP and DXF files with CAD geometry only are on the 2026 roadmap. Any RFQ that includes written part requirements will parse correctly today.
On standard job shop RFQs, extraction accuracy runs above 97 percent for quantities, part numbers, and material callouts. Complex documents with handwritten annotations or unusual abbreviations occasionally need a manual correction. You make those corrections in the draft review screen before anything goes to the customer.
The Shop Team and Multi-Shop plans include native integration with JobBoss and Shoptech E2, plus a Google Sheets sync for shops that use spreadsheets as their work order system. All plans include CSV export so you can pull data into any other system manually.
Yes. Your rate data is encrypted at rest and in transit. It is never used to train shared AI models and is never accessible to other Quote-AI customers. Each account is fully isolated. We are SOC 2 Type I certified with Type II audit in progress for Q3 2026.
Cancel any time from your account settings. No cancellation fee, no minimum term, no penalty. If you cancel mid-month, access continues through the end of the billing period. Your complete quote history is available for export in CSV or PDF at any time before and after cancellation.
Get Started
14-day free trial, full feature access, no credit card. Set up your rate sheet in 10 minutes and send your first AI-drafted quote before the end of the day.