cutting rate and pricing

[fantasy2]

Recently a lot of people asked me to cut stuff with my 60Watt CO2 laser but I still find it very difficult to determine the right costs so I wrote some software that calculates the total line length of the design they want to be cut.

I currently have it like this, but I'm not sure if it is expensive or very cheap:

- Base price: 5 euro + 0.003*totalLineLength - max of 25 euro
- Cut price: depends on the material, for 5mm acryl it is about 0.0022 euro/mm(0.056 euro/inch).
- Material price: my costs +20%.

My problem with this method is that cutting only one part is very expensive(which costs me customers). But cutting a lot of parts makes it very cheap. With google I can hardly find any shops with their prices on the website to use as a reference.

How do you charge people for cutting parts? What rates do you use?

[bpoulin]

I do mostly wood stuff, and my rule of thumb is usually 10x the material cost, so if I have a $1 piece of wood, I charge $10. I may change that as things go on, but for a starting point it's pretty decent. Now bulk orders do get a break, but that is usually negotiated not a set amount.

[Litografa]

My customers very often use hourly charge. But was very surprised during last trip - I have visited 12 customers in three different countries on 800 km distance and their hourly price was from 8 to 80 Euro per hour!!! Too big difference )

[keebler303]

There can be a fair amount of setup work for a laser depending on the design and geometry so it may be most of the cost for a single part. If its just a hobby, charge what you feel is fair and what will keep your "play money" coming in. We charge a setup fee plus $60-$100 per hour of running depending on risk and complexity for commercial work. We have some "pet" type projects too where we aren't really making any money but get paid enough to keep playing around with it.


Matt

[fantasy2]

Originally Posted by Litografa My customers very often use hourly charge. But was very surprised during last trip - I have visited 12 customers in three different countries on 800 km distance and their hourly price was from 8 to 80 Euro per hour!!! Too big difference )

But they only charge an hourly rate? For small parts that's very cheap. I calculated the cost per mm based on a 60 euro/hour rate.