# Marcus Tillman, Operations Manager / Senior Estimator at Lakeshore Precision Inc. — read of Quote-AI, May 10 2026

> 14 years in contract manufacturing, currently running the quoting desk and two junior estimators at a 22-person CNC job shop outside Rockford, IL. We do mostly turned and milled parts for ag equipment OEMs.

## How I got here

Typed "quoting software for job shop" into Google on my phone during lunch because I just spent three hours on a 12-part RFQ that the customer ghosted on. A sponsored result. Opened it in a tab, didn't read it until I got home after my kid's soccer practice. Came back to it with a beer, which is probably the most honest review condition possible.

## What I clicked first

The headline. "Stop losing Tuesday afternoon to quotes that never close." That landed. Not because it's clever, but because it is specifically Tuesday. I don't know how they knew, but Tuesday is when my inbox gets hammered after the weekend batch of drawings and I'm already behind on floor issues. Someone at this company has spent time in a shop. The sub-copy "outputs a signed-ready quote before the customer moves on" is also the right framing. The problem isn't just time, it's that speed is competitive.

## Where I paused

The NTMA citation. "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." I've been to NTMA meetings. That citation is plausible. But there's no year, no link, no report name. I could not verify that if I wanted to. That's the kind of thing a finance-minded shop owner is going to chase down before signing up, and the page gives them nothing to grab onto. Put the year. Put the study name. Or don't cite it.

## What I distrusted

"94% First-draft acceptance rate." That number is doing a lot of work on this page and I have no idea what it measures. 94% of drafts accepted by... the customer? The estimator reviewing internally? Accepted meaning signed, or accepted meaning "yeah send it"? On what volume of quotes? From how many shops? This is either a genuinely remarkable result or a number that sounds impressive and means something softer than it implies. I've seen enough vendor pitch decks to know which is more common.

Also: there is one customer quote on this entire page. One. Rick from Toledo. Rick sounds like a real person, which I appreciate, but one testimonial for a product that's asking me to trust it with my entire margin structure is thin. I want to see a fabrication shop. I want to see somebody with a harder material mix or tighter tolerances than turned parts.

## What would convince me

A real walkthrough of one quote, start to finish, with a messy real-world RFQ. Not a clean PDF with a single part. Give me a 7-part assembly with a drawing that has revision notes in the margin and a material callout that doesn't match the usual mill cert. Show me what the AI extracts versus what it misses and how a real estimator handles the delta. That's the video I'd watch twice.

I'd also want to know the failure modes. What happens when the AI misreads a tolerance? What happens when a customer emails a revision after the quote is drafted? What happens when my labor rates change mid-month? The page tells me everything works but says almost nothing about what breaks.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The 94% first-draft acceptance rate: can you tell me specifically what that measures, what the sample size is, and whether that's customer acceptance or internal sign-off?

2. We run about 60 to 80 quotes a month right now. The Solo plan caps at 40. If I go over in a given month, does it lock me out or does it just bill overage?

3. We use E2 Shop Tech. The page lists "Shoptech E2" as a supported integration, but it's only on the $149 plan. Is that a native sync or a Zap? Because E2's API is not well-documented and I've had two integrations break on version updates in the last three years.

## Verdict: curious-enough-to-reply

The domain knowledge is real and the problem framing is honest. The skeptic in me wants answers to a few specific questions before I touch a trial, but this is the first quoting tool page I've read that didn't make me feel like they were selling me project management software with a manufacturing skin on it.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-10. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*