Seven quoting mistakes that quietly kill your margin

Cost-side mistakes

1) Quoting material from finished weight instead of stock bought. 2) Machine rates that ignore depreciation and maintenance. 3) Forgetting failure and scrap - success pays for failures only if you price it in. 4) Unpaid setup: amortize it visibly across the batch.

Process-side mistakes

5) Slow quotes - the buyer who waited two days already ordered elsewhere. 6) No quantity breaks - customers order 10 when shown how 50 drops unit price, and you never offered. 7) Guess-based pricing that varies by mood: inconsistent quotes train customers to haggle.

The fix is systematic

A standing cost model - rates, materials, failure allowances, margins - turns quoting from an art into arithmetic. Update rates quarterly, then let every quote flow from the same numbers.

Systematize it today

Our calculators encode the full model per process; the SeekMake plugin automates it end-to-end on your own site, with AI reading the customer's actual geometry.