Every price Shr3Dt shows comes from three pages: Settings, Machines and Materials. Put your real numbers in them before your first quote, and that quote comes out the way you would price it by hand, only faster.
A new shop starts with default rates on the Settings page, but no machines or materials. The quote builder opens once you have at least one active machine, one active material and one customer. Customers who send a request through your website form are added for you.
1. Settings: your shop-wide rates
Settings apply to every new quote. A saved quote keeps the numbers it was priced with, so changing a rate never rewrites a quote you've already sent.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Company name | Shown in the app and in the email a customer gets when you accept their quote. Use the name customers know you by. |
| Currency | An ISO code such as EUR, USD or GBP. |
| Labour rate per hour | What an hour of operator time costs you, for setup and finishing. |
| Margin (%) | Added on top of the total cost, before discounts and tax. |
| Minimum price per line | No line on a quote prices below this. |
| Tax (%) | The default for new quotes. You can change it on each quote. |
| Quote valid for (days) | Sets the “valid until” date on each quote. |
| Volume discounts | A percentage off at 5+, 10+, 25+ and 50+ units. Each line gets the highest tier its quantity reaches. Set a tier to 0 to turn it off. |
| Pricing formula | How material, machine time and labour combine into a price. The default is cost plus your margin, times the lead-time multiplier. You can change it and test it against quotes you've already made before saving. |
New shops start at €35 an hour for labour, a 45% margin, an €8 minimum per line, 24% tax, quotes valid for 30 days, and discounts of 5, 10, 15 and 20%. Check every one. Tax in particular depends on where you trade.
Set the labour rate to what an hour of work really costs you or your staff, not what you hope to earn. Profit belongs in the margin, where you can see it.
The top of the Settings page also shows your public quote form: its address and an iframe snippet ready to copy. That has its own guide: Add the quote form to your website.
Working with others? Invite them by email from the Team section of the same page. Each person signs in with their own login, and everyone sees the same quotes and job board.
2. Machines: where the time cost comes from
Add each printer you quote on and want to schedule jobs on. Its numbers decide the machine-time cost of every line.
- Name, Make and Model. The name appears in the quote builder and on the job board, so make printers easy to tell apart: “X1C #1”, “X1C #2”. Make and model are optional.
- Technology. FDM, SLA, SLS or MJF. It decides how parts are priced (FDM as a shell plus infill, the others as solid, SLS and MJF without supports) and which materials can run on the machine.
- Build X, Y and Z (mm). The usable build volume. Quotes warn you when a part won't fit after trying all six orientations, and the website form uses it to pick a machine that can take the part.
- Throughput (cm³/h). How much material the printer actually lays down per hour on a typical job. This is the number that most affects your prices.
- Measured at layer (mm). The layer height of the job you measured throughput on. Finer layers on a quote line take proportionally longer.
- Overhead per layer (s). Time each layer costs whatever its size: travel, z-hop, a resin peel or a powder recoat.
- Measured at speed (mm/s). Leave this at 60 unless you have a reason to change it. The calibration guide explains why.
- Hourly rate. What an hour of the machine costs you: depreciation, power and maintenance.
- Setup (min). Hands-on time per build: preparing the file, loading material, clearing the plate, and for resin or powder the washing, curing or depowdering. It is spread across the quantity, not charged per part.
- Nozzle and filament diameter (mm). FDM only. Used by the real slicer check, in the quote builder and on the website form.
- Active. Untick it to take a printer out of new quotes and the website form, for example while it's being repaired.
If you haven't measured throughput yet, enter your best guess and come back to it after a few jobs. Calibrate a printer for accurate quotes shows how to measure it and how to work out an hourly rate.
3. Materials: what each gram costs
- Name. Customers see it on your website form, so use names they recognise: “PETG”, “Tough resin”, “Nylon PA12”.
- Process. FDM, SLA, SLS or MJF, matching the machines that run it. A material with no active machine of the same process doesn't appear on the website form, and the quote builder warns you if a line pairs a material with the wrong kind of machine.
- Density (g/cm³). From the datasheet. As a rough guide, PLA is about 1.24, PETG 1.27 and ASA 1.07.
- Price per kg. What you pay, delivery included. Resin is often sold by the litre: divide the price per litre by the density. Say €60 a litre at 1.1 g/cm³ comes to about €54.50 per kg.
- Waste (%). Purge, failed prints and powder you can't reuse. Base it on your real failure rate. SLS powder usually needs around 30%, because each build is topped up with fresh powder.
- Preview colour. The colour of the 3D preview in the quote builder.
- Colours customers can pick. One per line: a name, a space, then a hex code, such as
Black #0f172a. The first one is selected by default on the website form. - Best suited for. Tick the uses this material is good for. The website form uses these tags to suggest a material.
- Active. Untick it to hide a material you've run out of or stopped offering.
The materials table shows a cost per cm³ for each material, worked out from density, price and waste. It's a quick way to compare them.
4. Check one quote against a job you know
- Add a customer on the Customers page. A name and an email are enough.
- Open New quote and upload a part you've printed before: STL, OBJ or 3MF, up to 100 MB.
- Choose the machine and material, then match the settings you used: quantity, layer height, infill, supports, finishing minutes and lead time.
- Compare the line with what really happened. It shows the material, machine and labour cost, the print time and the mass.
If the print time is off, fix the machine's throughput first. If the mass is off, check density, infill and supports. Adjust margin last, once the cost is right. For FDM parts, “Verify with real slicer” slices the actual file and gives you a second opinion on time and material.
Changing things later
Prices and printers change. Edit a machine or material whenever you like: new quotes use the new numbers, and saved quotes keep theirs. If you remove a machine or material that appears on a saved quote, Shr3Dt retires it instead of deleting it. It disappears from new quotes and from your website form, and old quotes can still explain their prices.
Next steps
Measure your printers properly with Calibrate a printer for accurate quotes, then put the quote form on your site with Add the quote form to your website. No account yet? Start free.