Laser cutting cost calculator

1. Material. Your parts are nested on your sheet size to find how many sheets the job really takes. You buy whole sheets, so that is what’s charged, plus your markup.
2. Cutting. Every part’s outline is cut once, so the cut length is the perimeters of all the parts added up, and each part needs a pierce. Time is the cut length divided by your cutting speed, plus the pierces times your pierce time.
3. Loading. The minutes per sheet to load it and take the parts off.
4. Machine rate. Cutting and loading are charged at your rate per hour.

The price for each part takes its share of the material by area and of the loading by count, plus its own cutting time.

Each part is treated as a rectangle. Holes and cut-outs add cut length and a pierce each, so for parts with a lot of them, add a little to the price or put in a slower speed.

The pricing guide works through a full example. Cutting plate on a plasma table, or board on a router? There is a plasma version and a router version.

Your machine’s cutting tables give a speed for each material and thickness, but parts with lots of corners and small features never reach it. The most reliable figure is your own: time a typical job from the first pierce to the last part, then divide its total cut length by the minutes it took.

The 4 m/min the calculator starts with is only a starting point. Put in your own figures for the speed, the pierce time and the rate, and the prices will be yours.