Laser cutting

Instant laser cutting quotes, measured from the drawing

Your customer drops a DXF or SVG on your website. We read it — how much line the laser will cut, how many times it will pierce, how much sheet the part covers — and price it at your feed rates and your sheet prices. The same widget that quotes 3D printing, on the same plans, with no commission.

Try the live widget — 3D printing and laser cutting in one demo →

How the price is worked out

A laser job has two costs that a per-square-foot rate blurs together: the time the machine spends cutting, and the sheet the part uses up. We keep them apart, the way your own costing does.

time     = (cut length ÷ feed  +  pierces × pierce time  +  score length ÷ score feed)
           × (1 + travel overhead)
machine  = time × your hourly rate
material = footprint ÷ utilisation × (sheet price ÷ sheet area)
price    = machine + material + handling, per part × quantity
           never below your minimum order

• Cut length is the total length of every closed shape in the drawing — the outer edge and every hole. Arcs, circles, ellipses, splines and polyline bulges are measured as curves, not as their chords. Loose lines that meet end to end are joined into the shape the draughtsman meant.
• Pierces: one per closed shape. A plate with forty holes pierces forty-one times, and on 6 mm acrylic that is the difference between a quote that pays and one that does not.
• Feed rate is yours, per material and thickness — 3 mm acrylic and 6 mm MDF are two rows. Type the speeds from your LightBurn library.
• Footprint is the part's bounding box. Divided by your utilisation figure — how much of a sheet ends up as parts, 75% by default — it charges for the scrap around a shape without pretending to nest it. Area-based, not whole sheets: the eleventh part does not cost as much as the first ten.
• Score: paths on a layer named score, engrave, mark or etch are marked at your score feed. An open path without a scoring layer needs correction before it can be quoted.

Your settings screen shows what those numbers come to per foot of cut and per square foot beside each sheet material, so you can tune them until they match what you quote by hand today — then stop quoting by hand.

The unit problem, handled

A DXF that never had $INSUNITS set does not say whether 100 means millimetres or inches. An SVG from Illustrator is 72 pixels to the inch; from Inkscape or Figma, 96. Every laser shop has cut a part at the wrong size because of it.

The widget shows the customer the size the file was read at — 200 × 120 mm — and, when the file did not say, says so in amber and lets them pick the unit it was drawn in. The correction is one multiplier on the quote; a part read in the wrong unit is 25× too big and gets refused as too big for your bed, with a note to check the unit.

What is refused, and what is only noted

In the file	What happens
Text left as text (a DXF TEXT or MTEXT, an SVG <text>)	Refused, with “convert text to outlines”. A laser cannot cut a font it does not have, and quoting the file without its lettering would quote a different part.
No closed shape at all	Refused. Nothing to cut out.
An open path without a scoring layer	Refused. Close the cut outline or put intended scoring on a scoring layer.
A line drawn twice	Removed, so it is not cut twice, and noted.
A shape narrower than 0.5 mm	Noted as likely to burn away or fall through the grid.
Bigger than your bed, either way round	Refused, with the size, your bed, and the scale that would fit.
Embedded images or unsupported drawing entities	Refused to avoid pricing only part of the drawing. Export supported vector paths and try again.

Setting it up

1. Add a laser cutter under your machines: bed size, hourly rate, pierce time, and the share of a job the head spends travelling between cuts (set it so our time matches LightBurn’s estimate for a job you know).
2. Add your sheet materials — acrylic, MDF, plywood, mild steel and stainless are in the catalogue at common thicknesses with starting-point feeds. Fill in your feed, the sheet you buy and what you charge for it. A row is not offered to customers until its sheet price is in.
3. Set a handling fee per job (loading, weeding, de-masking) and a minimum order for sheet work, or leave them at your print figures.
4. The same embed on your site now takes DXF and SVG. A shop that only cuts sheet sees only sheet options; a shop that does both sees both, one basket at a time.

For developers

It is the same three requests as a print: register the model, PUT the bytes, ask for a quote against a material whose kind is laser. The model comes back with cut_length_mm, pierces, bbox_mm, units_known and the reader’s flags; the quote line with cut_seconds and amount. Details in the API reference.

Plans

Laser cutting is included in both plans — Quote and Checkout — at no extra charge, alongside 3D printing. There is no commission on orders: payments go to your own Razorpay account. Start with a 14-day trial.