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?