u/Mission_Bee_5772

Hi everyone,

I’m working on an MVP for CNC and mechanical workshops and would really appreciate feedback from people who quote jobs regularly.

The idea is not to replace estimators or generate fully automatic quotes.

The problem I’m looking at is earlier in the process: customers often send incomplete or unclear RFQs, and shops have to spend time going back and forth just to understand what the customer actually wants.

The MVP is a website-embedded RFQ intake agent.

A customer comes to the shop’s website and describes the part/job. The agent asks follow-up questions to collect the information a shop usually needs before quoting, such as:

• material
• quantity
• dimensions
• tolerances
• surface finish
• deadline
• use case
• threaded holes / clearance holes
• uploaded files, sketches, photos, STEP, PDF drawings, etc.

At the end, the shop gets a structured RFQ package with:

• customer summary
• extracted technical requirements
• uploaded files
• missing or unclear information
• suggested follow-up questions
• assumptions made
• a “quote readiness” score
• draft reply to the customer
• an automatically generated .STEP prototype

The system automatically generates a first .STEP prototype from the customer’s description and uploaded files. For the MVP, we’re focusing on common workshop requests such as mounting plates, brackets, spacers, hole-pattern parts, and similar mechanical components, but the goal is to support more complex parts as the workflow improves.

The generated prototype is meant to help clarify intent before quoting and is clearly labeled as a communication aid, not production-ready CAD.

The goal is:

>

A few questions for shop owners, estimators, machinists, and engineers:

1. How often do you get RFQs that are too incomplete to quote?
2. What information is most commonly missing?
3. Would a guided intake form/chat on your website help, or would customers avoid using it?
4. Is a “quote readiness” summary useful, or just noise?
5. Would an automatically generated .STEP prototype be useful for communication, or would that create more risk/confusion?
6. What would this need to do for you to actually use it?
7. Would you pay for something like this if it saved estimator/engineering time?

I’m especially interested in criticism. If this sounds like a bad idea, I’d like to understand why.

Thanks!