Flexible
When enquiries come in irregularly
€5€5net per quote
No subscriptionYou pay only when the engine actually prices something.
Start free- No monthly quote limit
- Owner account, no extra users
MetronQ is CNC machining quoting software (milling and turning) for machine shops. The engine reads a part's geometry from a 3D model or a technical drawing and prices it on your machines, rates and material costs; the technologist sees the cost breakdown and approves the quote before it reaches the customer. No generative models, no retyping dimensions.
Quotes approved without a correction
last 30 days, example dataQuotes this month
Engine accuracy
The quoting engine is deterministic: the same file and the same price list give the same figure today, tomorrow and a year from now. There is no temperature, no sampling and no language model that changed in the meantime. The price can be defended to a customer line by line, because every line comes from a measurement or from your price list.
Nine things that happen between the model going in and the net price per piece coming out. None of them is an estimate.
The geometry kernel rebuilds the solid from the file and measures every feature that costs time.
One by one: working envelope, smallest cutter in the crib, number of axes.
Operation by operation. Setup charged once per order.
Bar or plate from a stockist's catalogue, not the mass of the part.
Rather than price it anyway, the engine says which figure stopped it.
part_exceeds_envelope : mill-3ax : part_size_y : 350 : 310An engineer's correction goes back into the engine. After a dozen quotes it lands closer.
Split into parts, each priced on its own, one combined offer.
One line of code. The customer never leaves your domain.
<script
src="https://widget.metronq.com/metronq.js"
data-metronq-key="pk_your_key"
async></script>0
generative models in the quoting pathThese are the panel's screens, not a drawing of them: the same column headings, the same status chips, the same cost breakdown you get after signing in. Move through them with the arrows. The shop, its customers, its machines and the amounts are examples.
Every enquiry in one place: quantity, the net price of the whole order and where each one stands. The highlighted rows are waiting for your decision.
The engine does not multiply mass by a rate. It breaks the part into what actually occupies the machine and prices each item from your own list.
A CNC quoting calculator works from numbers somebody types into it. The difference is not speed, it is where the input comes from.
| Item | Calculator or spreadsheet | MetronQ |
|---|---|---|
| Dimensions | A person retypes the envelope from the drawing | Measured from the solid, with the waste volume |
| Holes | One field: how many holes | Each one separately, with diameter and depth |
| Threads | Somebody has to spot and count them | Recognised from geometry, a separate operation |
| Thin walls | Nothing | Thinnest wall measured, with a warning |
| Machine | One averaged rate | A named machine from your park |
| Batch | Price times quantity | Setup once per order |
| Part that cannot be made | Prices it anyway | Refuses and gives the measurement |
An online quoting form where the customer types the dimensions has one more flaw the table cannot show: it moves responsibility for the data onto the person least able to supply it. A buyer in purchasing does not know how many threaded holes a part has or how thin its thinnest wall is, so they enter an approximation, and the shop gets a quote built on somebody else's guess. Reading the solid avoids the problem entirely: the file knows everything about the part that pricing needs.
Start with 14 days free, no card. You pay once you decide to stay.
Pay per quote
When enquiries come in irregularly
€5€5net per quote
No subscriptionYou pay only when the engine actually prices something.
Start freeSubscription
When you quote regularly
€119€95monthly
First 14 days freePredictable cost and the full quoting engine from day one.
Start freeWhen you quote every day
€219€175monthly
Priority support with a reply within 24h and 1:1 consultations whenever you need them. We help you set your rates and price list so quotes match your costs.
Start freeEverything in Start, only:
At a fixed monthly price:
Everything in Start, plus:
Everything in Pro, plus:
For large companies and multiple sites
Everything tailored to your company - no rigid limits.
Let's talkEverything in Pro, plus:
All prices are net - VAT is added to each of them.
Rollout
Four steps on your side. The third is the one most often skipped, and skipping it costs the most.
Machines with their travels, available tooling, material grades and their prices.
A machine-hour rate per machine, setup and programming costs, margin.
A handful of parts you have already quoted. The most skipped step and the most expensive to skip.
With every quote held for approval at first. Automation once you trust the numbers.
One line of code. The customer prices a part on your site, with no email attachment and no waiting for a reply.
The enquiry that arrives today as an email with an attachment and the words "please quote" goes into the widget with the whole set of data: the file, the material, the quantity and the tolerances. The customer gets a figure straight away, or a note that the enquiry went to an engineer, and you get a line ready to approve instead of an empty spreadsheet.
The widget inherits your logo and colours, speaks four languages, and also works as a standalone quoting page if you would rather change nothing on your own site.
Not for pricing. The price comes from measurements of the solid and from the shop's price list, deterministically. Machine learning appears in one place, reading PDF drawings, where the model's job is to recognise characters, not to suggest a price.
That has a practical consequence: the same file and the same price list give the same price today and in six months, and the difference between two quotes can always be pointed at in one line of the breakdown.
What happens to your filesA calculator works from numbers somebody types in. MetronQ measures the part itself: it counts every hole with its diameter and depth, finds threads and pockets, checks the thinnest wall and picks a blank from sizes a stockist actually sells.
So the engineer does not start from an empty spreadsheet but from a finished breakdown: minutes of roughing, pockets and drilling, the cost of the material and of the set-up. Every one of those lines can be corrected before the offer goes out.
How instant quoting works3D models as STEP, STP, IGES and IGS, drawings as PDF and DXF, and photographs of a drawing as JPG, PNG, TIFF and WEBP. A 3D model gives a full geometry read; from a drawing the engine reads dimensions, tolerances and the material note.
One part can arrive as both at once: the model carries the geometry, and the drawing adds the tolerances, the thread notes and the heat treatment that the solid does not hold.
Supported filesIt depends on time on the machine, the machine-hour rate, the material and the batch size. For an example 120 mm aluminium 6061 flange in a batch of 25 it comes to 148.30 zł net per piece, of which 85.20 zł is the machining itself. The same piece as a one-off costs more, because the setup has nothing to spread across.
Rates and qualityMost of the time goes not on calculating but on waiting: for an engineer's free half hour and for the customer to answer about material and batch size. The widget collects that with the file and the engine prices it immediately, so the engineer gets a finished line to approve instead of an empty spreadsheet.
What counts in practice is how many offers go out the same day. A customer who waits three days usually has two other quotes on the desk by then and is choosing between those.
How to stop losing enquiriesFrom minutes, not from mass. Time on the machine is multiplied by the machine-hour rate; to that you add material priced as the BLANK rather than as the finished part, the set-up charged once per order, and margin. Two mistakes account for most of the drift: material costed from the part's own weight instead of from the stock you have to buy, and set-up charged on every piece instead of once per batch.
How quoting worksUnit price = (material + machining) × (1 + margin) + set-up costs divided by quantity. Material is blank volume × density × price per kilogram. Machining is minutes ÷ 60 × the machine-hour rate. The minutes are roughing, pockets, finishing and drilling added together and adjusted for how complex the part is. That is the formula the MetronQ engine runs, and the same breakdown an engineer sees on every quote.
Software that sits in front of CAM and in front of the ERP. CAM knows the cycle time only once the part has been programmed, and the ERP starts working once the price is already agreed - a quoting system fills the gap between them: it prices the part from the model before anyone writes a machine program, and hands the finished line on through an API.
Which also says where it sits in the company: it replaces neither CAM nor the ERP, it closes the quoting stage that today usually lives in a spreadsheet and in one person's head.
Getting startedOnly if the shop decides it is. By default a quote reaches the customer after an engineer has approved it, and the safety gates hold back anything the engine cannot price with confidence - thin walls, unusual sizes, parts outside the machine park. A shop can also switch automatic sending on for chosen materials or batch sizes.
Approval leaves a trace: who released the price, and by how much they corrected what the engine worked out. Those corrections feed the calibration, so later quotes for similar parts land closer to the prices the shop would have given anyway.
Safety gatesAccording to its own website (as of 5 October 2026), Oroox is an online sales platform for manufacturers: quoting, a B2B storefront, payments and shipping, for sheet metal, tubes, CNC machining and additive, with a minimum contract term of 12 months. MetronQ does quoting only, for milling and turning, on the shop's own machines and rates, without online payments, paid per quote or by monthly subscription with no annual contract.
The full MetronQ and Oroox comparisonAutomatic CNC machining quoting means working out the price of a part with no person involved in the arithmetic. Instead of copying dimensions off a drawing into a spreadsheet, the software reads the geometry of the solid, recognises the features that cost machine time, turns them into minutes and the minutes into money using one particular shop's price list. The person comes back at the end, as whoever approves the price or corrects it.
MetronQ is quoting software for machine shops: milling, turning and assemblies. Automatic quoting of CNC parts here covers assemblies too - the engine breaks one into its parts, prices each separately and puts them back together as one offer. It is not a marketplace and not a broker. The quotes are yours, the price list is yours, and the customer asks you.
The engine works from a solid model or from a technical drawing. From the model it reads the bounding box, the volume, every hole with its diameter and depth, threads, pockets, corner radii and the thinnest wall. From a drawing it reads dimensions, tolerances and the material note. It then tries the part against the machines in the shop's park, checks that it fits the work envelope and that the smallest corner can be cut with a tool that is actually on the shelf, and only then works out the time operation by operation.
There is no generative model anywhere in that path. The quote is deterministic: the same file and the same price list give the same figure today and in a year. Machine learning appears in one place, reading PDF drawings, where the model's job is to recognise the characters on a drawing and never to propose a price.
Quoting machining comes down to five things: time on the machine multiplied by the machine-hour rate, material priced as a blank, set-up charged once per order, attendance and tooling, and margin. What differs between shops is not the formula - it is which of those lines somebody worked out and which they remembered.
Two places account for most of the errors. Material costed as the weight of the finished part rather than as the whole blank understates the price, and the more metal comes off as swarf the worse it gets. And set-up added to every piece instead of once per order, which is harmless on a one-off and loses the tender at a hundred.
The formula for machining cost is short, and the formula is not the hard part. Unit price is (material + machining) × (1 + margin), plus the set-up costs divided by the batch size. Material is blank volume × density × price per kilogram. Machining is minutes ÷ 60 × the machine-hour rate. Set-up is the number of fixturings × their time × that same rate.
Filling that formula with numbers is the hard part. How to cost machining so that the minutes are minutes rather than an impression: the engine works the time out from the volume of material to be removed, the area to be finished and the individual features - holes, pockets, threads - and not from a finished toolpath, which does not exist yet at the enquiry stage. It then adjusts the result for how complex the part is, and never goes below the minimum cycle that machine carries in the price list.
The machine-hour rate is the one number in that formula that cannot be read out of a file, because it describes the shop and not the part. It is built from the bottom up: depreciation or the lease payment, power and compressed air, cutting tools and coolant, servicing and wear parts, the operator's wage with on-costs, and a share of the building and the office. That sum is divided by the hours the machine actually works.
The denominator is not the hours in the calendar - it is productive hours, after downtime, set-ups and servicing have come off. A shop that divides by the full calendar gets an hourly rate that is optimistic by tens of percent. In MetronQ the rate is entered per machine rather than per shop, because a lathe and a five-axis machining centre have different depreciation and different tooling, and one averaged rate across the park means simple turning is subsidising milling.
Unit price does not fall linearly with the batch, and this is where quoting by hand goes furthest wrong. Some costs happen once per order: setting the machine, the first part, presetting the tools, inspecting the first good one. Some happen on every piece: cycle time, material, insert wear, and - where the blank is cut to size - the cut itself. MetronQ separates the two groups and shows them as separate lines.
The technical cost of manufacture is the sum of those components: what the part costs the shop. The offered price is that plus margin. Unit costing only means anything while those two figures are kept apart; otherwise a negotiation slides below cost and nobody notices, because the spreadsheet shows one number.
An online quoting form in which the customer types the dimensions moves responsibility for the data onto the person least able to supply it. A buyer in a purchasing department does not know how many tapped holes the part has or what its thinnest wall is, so they enter an approximation, and the shop gets a quote built on somebody else's guess. A CNC cost calculator has the same flaw seen from the shop's side: it works from numbers somebody typed into it.
Reading the solid avoids the problem entirely, because the file knows everything about the part that a price needs. The reading is repeatable too: quote the same part twice and you get the same figure twice, which is not something that can be said of quoting by hand. That is why online CNC quoting is worth having only when a file feeds it the numbers, not a form.
A machine shop usually runs three layers of software and often tries to quote in one of them, because it happens to be open. CAD and CAM design the part and generate toolpaths, but they only know the cycle time once the part has been programmed - work nobody will do for an enquiry that may never become an order. The ERP runs orders, stock and invoices, but it starts once the price is settled. A spreadsheet fills the gap between them for exactly as long as one person is writing it.
Software for a machine shop that does the quoting sits in front of all of that: it prices the part from the model before anyone writes a machine program, and hands the finished line to the ERP through an API. A quoting system in that sense replaces none of the three layers - it fills the gap a spreadsheet occupies today.
Customer files are processed on our own infrastructure and encrypted at rest. They are not sent to any external artificial-intelligence vendor, for any purpose - the terms of service say so outright. Customer contact details are encrypted in the database under a different key than the files.