Lost bids · margin erosion · hours burned on manual quotes
Every process running its own spreadsheet costs you real money: bids lost to slower, inconsistent estimates, margin quietly eaten by jobs quoted on gut feel, and estimators spending hours rebuilding a takeoff instead of chasing the next job. CostDFM is the should-cost engine behind every Partimation and Castimation quote — rate libraries, quantity curves, and tooling amortization worked the same way whether the job gets milled, welded, printed, or cast — so every line names the rule that produced it, and every estimate carries a confidence band that tightens as your own actuals come in.
Free to start · no credit card · your rates stay yours.
The problem
Machining has one spreadsheet, welding another, casting a third — built by whoever had time, and nobody left can explain why two similar jobs land on different numbers.
A defensible estimate needs a real cost model — rates, posture, tooling amortization, quantity breaks — not a cycle-time guess multiplied by a shop rate and called a quote.
The job runs, the real numbers land, and the model never learns from them — so the next quote repeats the same miss.
What you get
Rates, station posture, and cost drivers are computed the same way regardless of process, so a should-cost from one process family is genuinely comparable to another — not two different guesses side by side.
Cost lines trace back to a named rate, a posture setting, or a rule in the engine — never an opaque total. If you don't trust a line, you can see exactly what produced it.
See the price at prototype, low-rate, and production quantities, with tooling and setup amortized across the run — not a single number that only holds at one quantity.
Every estimate carries a basis — prior or calibrated — and when your ERP actuals feed back in, the band narrows around your shop's real performance instead of staying a generic industry guess forever.
How it works
A part, a process, and a quantity — from any Partimation module, or entered directly.
Rates, station posture, setup, and tooling amortization come out named, not bundled into one total.
See the should-cost at every quantity break, with a confidence band on each point.
Feed real job actuals back in and the band tightens around your shop's own numbers going forward.
Pricing
Priced for a one-person estimator and a multi-process shop alike. Estimating is unmetered — run as many jobs as you like.
EUR and GBP prices exclude VAT, added at checkout where it applies. Early adopters keep their price as the suite grows.
Run it your way
Sign in and estimate from any browser. We run the compute, ship the updates, and keep your rates yours — the shared model only ever learns from your own actuals to calibrate your bands.
Aerospace and anyone who can't put shop rates in someone else's cloud can run the whole thing on their own hardware. Licenses and updates are signed files — it never phones home, so an air-gapped install stays air-gapped.
Part of the suite
One cost model, called by machining, fabrication, additive, and casting — see the rest of the suite at partimation.com/#modules.
FAQ
Every cost line traces back to a named rate, a posture setting, or a rule in the engine — never an opaque total. If you don't trust a line, you can see exactly what produced it. Hand a buyer the ledger and the argument stops being your word against theirs: it becomes a rate they can check and a quantity break they can read for themselves.
Every result carries a confidence value and names which of four things it rests on: a published prior, a calibration built from your own shop's actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that it needs human review. Reading the basis tells you what to do next — a deterministic rule needs no second opinion, and a needs-human-review flag is where an estimator's time actually belongs.
Your shop's machine rates, labor rates, and cost model get set once in Rates Studio, and every quote across every process pulls from them. Rates are edited the way a shop's rates actually change — a machine class re-rated, a burden moved, a station's posture adjusted — instead of a fixed price book with a manual correction applied afterwards by whoever remembers to.
A correction on a cost line — what actually happened on the job — feeds a calibration record. As real actuals come in, the confidence bands tighten around your own shop's performance instead of staying a generic published prior. The miss becomes an input, so the next quote on a similar job starts closer than the last one did.
Get started
Estimate a real job free in your browser, or book a walkthrough set up for your shop's rates and processes.
Book a demo
We reply within one business day.