Whenever a shop buys a cutting machine (laser, plasma, waterjet, blade), the same question shows up almost immediately: how do we price the parts it produces? Everyone knows what belongs in the price. The hard part is turning it into the cost of a single part, quickly, without pulling in half the company.
CUTL is an online service built to answer that question. It ties cost to machine time, calculates the geometry of your parts automatically, and gives a manager a ready price in minutes.
What goes into a part's cost
At a high level every shop agrees on the ingredients:
- Machine depreciation
- Operator wages
- Workshop rent, electricity, heating
- Extra operations: bending, engraving, painting, assembly, packaging
The real challenge is translating all of that into a per-part number. Imagine a typical order: 10 different parts, 5 pieces each, cut from sheet. You can estimate the material, but how much operator wage belongs to each part? How do you fold in workshop overhead and turn it into a clear price list?
Why manufacturer cutting tables aren't enough
Most shops start from the cutting-parameter tables supplied with the machine: speed, power, supported materials and thicknesses. But those numbers assume ideal conditions: perfect calibration, new optics, clean mechanics. Real, repeatable production usually needs different settings.
Actual cutting speed is shaped by things the table doesn't show:
- Speed drop on curves: the smaller the radius, the slower the head moves.
- Positioning time: the head needs time to travel to each start point.
- How the controller reads geometry: an arc exported as 1,000 tiny segments cuts very differently from a smooth arc.
- Corner behaviour: stop, lift, reposition, lower, continue: every corner adds time.
You can't model all of this per drawing, but you can average it by cutting test contours of equal length and comparing the time.
From measured time to a price
Measure a real cut. Build a test file with three one-metre contours of deliberately different character: a straight line, a smooth curve, and a complex curve. If your machine cuts all three in roughly the same time, use the average; if not, take the figure from the curved contours rather than the straight one, or contour-heavy parts will be under-priced. Say the file totals about 68 seconds as continuous paths, roughly 23 seconds per metre. Now cut a single metre split into 10 short segments: it takes about 30 seconds. The extra 7 seconds is the 9 additional pierces and the repositioning between segments, roughly 0.8 seconds per pierce including the traverse. For this material, then, a metre of cutting costs about 23 seconds, plus roughly 0.8 seconds for every pierce. (The per-metre figure already includes a contour's first pierce, so on very short contours the two terms overlap slightly; for real parts the error is negligible.) Those two figures, seconds per metre and seconds per pierce, are what the cost model needs.
Now cost an hour of machine time. Add up monthly operators, depreciation and workshop cost, divide by the real cutting hours in a month (not the calendar hours: a shift rarely cuts more than about 7 of 8 hours). That yields a cost per hour; divide by 60 for the cost per minute, which combined with your seconds-per-metre gives a price per metre of cut and per pierce.
One source of truth
With cutting length, pierce count and material area calculated automatically, everyone works from the same figures:
- Accounting sees planned material consumption.
- Procurement knows how much to buy.
- Managers quote fast and confidently.
That's the point of CUTL: clear calculations, real production logic, and far less guesswork. The next guide, Getting started, sets up your first machine, material and cutting mode so you can price a real part.