Your $3 sign actually costs $8
Most laser shops price off the sheet. But the sheet is barely a third of the cost. The CO2 tube burning down its life, energy, finishing and labour make up the rest — and almost nobody charges for them.
Free plan. No credit card required.
The CO2 tube is a cost that vanishes from the quote
Every hour of cutting burns a fraction of your tube's life — a four-figure part that lasts around 2,000 hours. Add the lens, mirrors, extraction filter and the chiller running alongside. CrafterBy turns all of it into a real hourly cost, baked into every piece before you send the price.
Isto não é maquete. É o produto rodando.
A real product in a real CrafterBy workspace: an acrylic sign. The sheet costs $2. CrafterBy shows what the job actually consumed.
- Sheet (3mm acrylic)
- R$ 11,54
- Labour (16 min)
- R$ 10,13
- Machine + tube + energy
- R$ 3,12
- Consumables + overhead
- R$ 3,94
- Real cost
- R$ 28,73
- Selling price
- R$ 47,40
- Margin
- 39,4%
Cost breakdown of an acrylic sign in CrafterBy — sheet, labour, machine and overhead, separately.
Your quoting thinks in sheets. Not in cost.
Most laser shops quote off sheet area, because it is the easy number. It is also less than half of what the piece truly costs.
What you calculate today
Correto, e muito longe de ser suficiente.
- 620 cm² of acrylic — $2.10
- 33 min cut + engrave
O que fica de fora
Cada um destes é um custo real que você já está pagando.
- Machine depreciation across its working life
- Power drawn by the laser, chiller and extraction
- Pieces burnt by wrong focus or power
- File prep, mask removal and finishing
- Hot bending, edge polishing, assembly
- Lens, mirrors, filters and the CO2 tube burning down
Quote on the sheet alone and you run at a loss without noticing.
Six costs in every piece. Most shops charge one.
CrafterBy models each layer separately, so the number you quote reflects what the job genuinely consumes.
Sheet and waste
Acrylic, MDF, plywood and metal priced by the area you actually buy, with a waste factor covering nesting offcuts and trim.
Waste factor per sheet
Machine time and depreciation
Give each laser a price and a working life, and CrafterBy turns cut hours into a real hourly cost, including the setup and warm-up that produce nothing.
Straight-line depreciation
Energy
Set total wattage (laser + chiller + extraction) and your kWh rate. A long cut in thick stock costs measurably more to run.
Watts x hours x kWh rate
Burnt pieces
Pieces scrapped by wrong focus or power are logged at the stage they failed, so the sheet, hours and energy lost land on the product that caused it.
Scrap tracked per stage
Labour
File prep, mask removal, assembly and packing are real hours. Record them at your own rate instead of absorbing them for free.
Multiple labour rates per product
Finishing and consumables
Hot bending, polishing, gluing — plus lens, mirrors, filters and the CO2 tube — are hourly costs CrafterBy bakes in automatically.
Stage-by-stage costing
The burnt piece is the cost nobody quotes for
Half an hour of cutting and the sheet comes out with a charred edge or the cut did not close. The sheet is gone, the machine time is gone, the energy is gone, and the tube burned its life down all the same. In most laser shops that loss quietly disappears into a margin nobody recalculates.
CrafterBy gives failure a home. Add a waste factor so every job carries its share of expected loss, or log scrapped pieces against a specific stage so a bad batch is charged to the product that caused it. Either way, the number stops hiding.
From sheet to quote in under a minute
Set the shop up once. Every job after that is priced in the time it takes to read the customer's email.
- 1
Add your machines and sheets
Enter each laser's price, wattage, lifespan and tube life. Add your sheets at what you actually paid.
- 2
Build the product
Pick the sheet and area, set cut and engrave time, add labour and finishing. The full cost assembles as you go.
- 3
Set your margin and send it
Choose a markup or a target margin for your selling price. Save it as a template and reuse it for the next order.
Built for shops running more than one machine
A 100W CO2 laser and a fibre marker do not cost the same per hour, and averaging them hides which one is carrying the other. CrafterBy costs each machine on its own terms.
Set up your machines- An individual cost per hour for every machine
- A sell price per hour, so quoted and actual can be compared
- Tube life and replacement cost per hour
- Usage tracked per machine, month over month
Questions laser shops ask
- Does it work for acrylic, MDF and metal at once?
- Yes. Sheets are priced by area in the unit you buy, so acrylic, MDF, plywood, leather and metal are handled the same way, each with its own waste factor.
- How do I account for CO2 tube wear?
- Enter the tube's life in hours and its replacement cost on the machine. CrafterBy spreads that across every cut hour, so each piece carries the fraction of tube it burned.
- What about pieces that burn or come out wrong?
- Two ways, and you can use both. A waste factor on the sheet spreads expected loss. Logging scrapped pieces on a production order charges a specific failure to the product that caused it.
- Can I reuse a calculation for similar orders?
- Yes. Save any product as a template and duplicate it for size, material or customer variants. Update a sheet price once and every product using it reflects the change.
Stop guessing what your pieces cost
Set up your machines and sheets in an afternoon, then price every order that follows with confidence.
Free plan available. No credit card required.