What’s new

Every one of these
used to be an email.

49things changed across the quoter and your account. They are grouped by the question each one answers, because that is how they were actually decided — one complaint at a time, over nine years.

01

“How much, and how long?”

Used to be: You sent the files, then waited for a reply that came the next morning. If it came.

Quoting used to be the slowest part of an otherwise fast process. A file went out, a person opened it, a number came back, and somewhere inside that loop a whole day quietly disappeared. The quoter closes the loop: the geometry is measured, the price is computed against it, and the calendar is put next to it — before you have finished reading this paragraph.

How much, and how long? — Makelab
Lead time and price side by side, before you commit to either.

A price in seconds

Upload a part and the number comes back while you are still looking at it — priced against the actual geometry, not a rough guess at a category.

Whatever your CAD spits out

STEP, STL, OBJ, 3MF, Rhino, SolidWorks part and assembly files, Inventor, Fusion, CATIA, Parasolid, IGES, PLY and glTF. Nineteen formats in all, and you can hand us a ZIP of the lot rather than uploading them one at a time.

The date, next to the price

Lead time sits beside the number instead of arriving in a follow-up, so the trade-off between cost and calendar is one you make yourself.

Five speeds to choose from

Next day, rush, standard, extended, or no rush at all — each one priced in front of you, so paying for speed is always a decision rather than a default.

A countdown you can see

Checkout shows exactly how long is left to make today’s cutoff, which beats guessing whether four in the afternoon still counts as today.

It will not let you overpromise

Ask for next day on something too large, or on more parts than can physically be made in time, and the quoter declines rather than taking the order and disappointing you later.

Handed to a person when it needs one

Jobs that genuinely need a human eye route themselves to an RFQ automatically, instead of slipping through as an order nobody flagged.

Pickup or delivery, remembered

Set your usual once — pickup, shipping, or your own courier, with delivery instructions attached — and it is there next time.

02

“Will it actually print?”

Used to be: You found out three weeks in, from a technician who opened the file and found a wall at 0.4mm.

Almost every expensive surprise in manufacturing starts as a small geometric fact that nobody noticed early enough. A wall too thin to survive the process. A feature too fine to resolve. These things cost nothing to fix at upload and a great deal to fix once a machine is running, so the quoter goes looking for them the moment your file lands rather than the week it reaches the floor.

Will it actually print? — Makelab
Wall thickness as a heat map, with every band named for what it actually does on the machine.

Thin walls, in colour

The whole part is shaded by wall thickness the moment it loads, and the legend names the real consequence of each band — will not print, will likely fail, prints with defects, prints clean.

Check any wall yourself

Click a face and the probe reports the local thickness right there, for when you want a number rather than a colour.

Warned before you pay

Features that are too thin or too small to survive the process are called out at upload, while a revision still costs you nothing.

Point at the thing you mean

Drop pins directly onto the model to flag spots for our team, so "the boss near the fillet" stops being a sentence anyone has to write.

Say which way is up

Click the face that should sit on the build plate and the orientation is set — the decision that quietly determines where layer lines and witness marks land.

Mark what has to look good

Paint the cosmetic faces straight onto the model. Drag to paint, Alt-drag to erase, and the square brackets resize the brush.

Hollow it out

Take the material out of the middle where it is doing nothing, and watch the price move as you do.

03

“How big is that, really?”

Used to be: A number in millimetres, and a guess.

Dimensions stay abstract until they are standing next to something. Every engineer knows this, which is why there is a part on your desk right now being silently compared to a coffee cup. The quoter does that deliberately — and in doing so catches the two size mistakes that actually cost money: parts that will not fit the machine, and parts that turn out to be nothing like the size you had pictured.

How big is that, really? — Makelab
A soda can stands beside your model, so the size is never an abstraction.

A soda can, always

There is a can sitting next to your part at true scale, because nobody has an instinct for 148 millimetres but everybody has one for that.

Sized against real things

Where a comparison helps, the quoter reaches for something you have actually held rather than another number.

Too big, and shown why

Parts that exceed the build volume are flagged with the box drawn around them, so you can see how far over you are and by which axis.

Dimensions you can put away

The bounding box and its measurements are there when you are checking fit, and gone when you are looking at the part.

Your units, set once

Pick millimetres or inches in your preferences and every part you ever open respects it.

Or per model, when it differs

A file that came in from someone else can be read in its own units without changing anything else you work in.

04

“Let me actually look at it”

Used to be: You opened it in CAD yourself, or you took our word for it.

A quoting tool that shows you a thumbnail is asking you to trust it. We would rather hand you the instruments. Everything here is a move you already make in CAD — cut it open, measure across it, strip the shading, put half the assembly away — except it happens in a browser tab, on the same model we are about to price.

Let me actually look at it — Makelab
A cut plane you drag straight through the part — the same move you would make in CAD.

Cut straight through it

Drag a section plane through the model to see the inside — wall thicknesses, internal geometry, and whether that boss is actually where you think it is.

Measure anything

Click two points and get the distance, without leaving the browser or going back to the source file.

Wireframe when you need it

Drop the shading to see the structure underneath, the way you would in any CAD package.

Hide what is in the way

Show and hide individual parts like a CAD tree, so a twelve-part assembly is not twelve things fighting for the same space.

Snap to a face

Click any face and the camera squares up to it, which is faster than orbiting until it looks about right.

A view cube, where you expect it

Top, front, right and back are one click away, and there is a home button for when you have lost yourself entirely.

Auto-rotate, and fit to frame

Let it turn while you think, or snap everything back into view when you have wandered off.

The mouse does what it should

Pan, zoom and scroll behave the way they do everywhere else, because nobody should have to learn a new set of hands.

Keyboard where it saves time

Command-A or Ctrl-A selects everything, shift-click and shift-drag extend a selection in most places, and the brackets resize the brush while painting.

05

“Do it once, not twenty times”

Used to be: You set the same option on part after part after part.

Nothing about a forty-part order is intellectually difficult. It is the same small decision, forty times over, with forty chances to get one of them wrong. These exist so that a large order costs you roughly what a small one costs you in attention.

Do it once, not twenty times — Makelab
One part configured, then pushed to every other part in the scene.

Set it once, apply it everywhere

Configure one part the way you want it and push those settings to every other part in the quote, instead of repeating yourself down a list.

Duplicate in place

Need another one, or another eleven? Copy it where it stands rather than uploading the same file again.

Scale it, evenly

Resize the whole part and watch the dimensions and the price update together.

Or stretch one axis

Scale independently along X, Y or Z when the part needs to grow in one direction and stay put in the others.

One file, many parts

When a file contains several separate shells, quote each one as its own part rather than splitting the file by hand first.

Space them out

Adjust the gap between parts on screen so a crowded plate is legible while you work.

Quantities per part

Set counts individually, so one order can carry a single prototype and forty of something else.

06

“Do I have to ask someone?”

Used to be: An email to your rep, and a wait. Every single time.

This is the group we are most pleased with and the least interesting to look at. None of it is clever. It is simply everything that used to require a person, a thread and a wait — paperwork, terms, changes, history, money — now sitting somewhere you can reach at ten at night without asking anybody for anything.

Do I have to ask someone? — Makelab
Every order in one place — status, materials, due dates and totals.

No account to create

There is no sign-up form. You put in your email, you are in, and you can set a password later if you would rather have one.

Everything you have ordered

Every past order in one place with status, materials, due dates and totals — the view that used to require asking someone who was in a meeting.

Order it again

Reorder a part you ran last year in a click, at whatever the current price is, without hunting for the original file.

Your files, still here

The models you have uploaded stay in your account. You never re-upload something we already have.

Quotes you can pick back up

Saved quotes wait for you, so a quote built on Friday is still there on Monday when the budget conversation finishes.

Send it to whoever pays

Hand a quote to the person holding the card — they can open it and pay it without an account of their own, and you stay copied.

Change it yourself

Quantity, shipping address, delivery date. What used to be an email, a wait, a confirmation and another wait now takes about a minute.

Tax exemption, filed

Submit your exemption certificate in the portal instead of attaching it to a thread and hoping it reaches the right person.

An NDA without the thread

Our mutual NDA is right there to review and sign, rather than being a three-day negotiation before anyone talks about parts.

Apply for Net 30

Terms are applied for in the portal, and once they are approved they simply appear at checkout.

What your credit is worth

Your balance is visible, and it applies itself at checkout instead of being something you have to remember to mention.

Defaults that stick

Your usual lead time, dispatch method, courier and delivery instructions are remembered, so the tenth order asks fewer questions than the first.

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