Please tell us your budget…
The toughest part about running a custom CNC shop is figuring-out what our client’s budgets are when they don’t want to tell us upfront what it is! This approach puts you behind, not ahead in negotiations.
Why budgets are important
CNCROi.com works on a per-project basis, generally, you tell us what you want and how much you have to spend and we give you a range of options. This saves us time (and you money) going back and forth pitching design concepts and ideas.
For instance, if you want a custom corporate conference table built and designed by us, what you get in both attention to detail (design) and materials is vastly different if you have 10K or 50K to spend with us… and no, you won’t get the same “look and feel” of a 50K table with only a 10K budget.
A designer might tell you “yeah, we pay the same amount of time on details with 10K as we do on a 50K project” but they are just lying to you. Either their 50K project is really worth 10K or they are buying stuff from a local liquidation shop and giving it a new coat of paint. I doubt if you had a salary of 50K a year that you’d to the exact same job for 10K a year… so why would a designer? It makes no sense.
The material properties and strength characteristics of a custom CNC laser cut 304 Stainless Steel table with fiber annealed details and inlayed mahogany is completely different from what you can achieve using regular CNC routed plywood with a CNC laser glass etched surface. The only characteristic they will share is that they are both called a table.
Design is EVERYTHING!
If you have no idea what you want but know how much you have to spend, then the design, materials and production equipment required to make it happen are incredibly straight forward. If you are looking for ideas without any budget established to shoot over to your boss, you are honestly wasting your time (and your boss’ money).
Your boss might have a budget of 5K in mind for something and what we propose to you can range wildly from that number up and down, we don’t know what your budget is remember… then you go see your boss and he freaks out or says “I want X for Y price”. Then you come back to us trying to get a Rolls Royce for the price of a Honda Civic to save face with your boss and look like a hero. The design world doesn’t work that way. If you would have told us your budget was 5K, you’d have a bunch of options AROUND PRICE POINT to present to your boss. Everybody is happy!
A clearer illustration of how much design affects price is the Eiffel Tower I designed.
Looks great doesn’t it? You are looking at hardboard and a cost of a few thousand dollars to cut at the designed scale. If you only have a few hundred dollars to spend, we can still cut this out for you, but then you’d only have the outlines of each shape cut and a scaled-down version at that, most likely out of cardboard. Is it still an Eiffel Tower you’d be proud to show-off? NO WAY! Welcome to the world of custom CNC designing.
We can cut this out of 316 stainless steel at double scale (5 meters high) with LED lighting throughout if your budget has room for it just as easily as thick paper at a third scale… the price will fluctuate accordingly.
Volume
Once we know your budget, the next thing we need to know is volume, is this a one-off or do you want several thousand units over a certain period of time? The price of each individual unit may go down with quantity up to a certain point but that depends on materials and production times.
The individual price difference between a hundred and a thousand units is rather small in the grand scheme of things but it’s still important when it comes to budgeting.
CNC cut and engraved “love” coasters.
Materials
Knowing you want something made out of a specific material will play a big role in how much you can get for the budget you allocated. As part of our design process, we also suggest a range of material options so you can go with design A using all Cherry wood for instance or B using pieces of it here and there but bigger or different elements incorporated into it to fit within a specific budget.
Just because you like Cherry doesn’t mean your entire project needs to be made out of Cherry! Take the IKEA approach to designing, spend the money on things you SEE and USE, not on things you don’t.
Open Communication
Being upfront with your budget is the easiest method to get the ball rolling. All of our work is completely custom to our clients needs so please contact us with a budget, it will save everybody time and ultimately money.