Cost & Estimate

Estimating built for real fabrication, not a spreadsheet guess.

Quotestimate prices piping, pressure vessels, heat exchangers, and structural steel the way your shop actually builds them — operation by operation, from cutting through PWHT and NDE — instead of one flat rate per pound.

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Free download, no obligation. 30 days, full access, no card required to install.

30-DAY TRIAL
Estimate — 6" Sch 80 CS Spool JOB 4471
Material$1,284.60
Cutting & fit-up$312.40
Welding (GTAW root / SMAW fill)$918.75
PWHT — furnace, 2 cycles$556.30
NDE — RT + PMI, 24 joints$744.00
Hydrotest & coating$266.10
Overhead + contingency$611.85
Sell Price $4,694.00
Built around the codes your customers already ask for
ASME B31.3ASME Sec. VIII Div. 1ASME Sec. IX AISC 360 / AWS D1.1TEMASMACNANACE MR0175
Why it's different

Most estimating tools multiply weight by a rate. This one runs the job.

A flat $/lb number can't tell you why one spool costs three times as much as another that weighs the same. (Spoiler: it's the fourteen PWHT thermocouples.) Quotestimate breaks every line into the operations a shop actually performs, and prices each one.

Generic weight-based estimator

  • ✕ Material weight × a single blended rate
  • ✕ No distinction between welding processes
  • ✕ PWHT and NDE guessed as a flat add-on %
  • ✓ Fast to type in

Quotestimate

  • ✓ Cutting, forming, fit-up, welding, machining, priced separately
  • ✓ Weld process, size, and joint count drive labor and consumables
  • ✓ PWHT hold/ramp hours, thermocouples, furnace vs. local heating
  • ✓ NDE by type — RT, UT, MT, PT, PMI, VT — in-house or subcontracted

Guessing is free. Being wrong on a fixed-price bid isn't.

Capabilities

Everything that goes into a real fabrication quote.

Every parameter below feeds the same estimate — nothing is a separate spreadsheet.

Piping & Pressure Equipment

  • ASME B31.3 process piping costing, joint by joint
  • ASME Sec. VIII Div. 1, Pressure Vessel fabrication
  • Design pressure/temperature, corrosion allowance, NACE MR0175 sour service
  • Hydrotest and pneumatic test hours, tracked per line
  • Hardness testing (P-No 4/5 alloys, NACE MR0175) and Charpy impact testing (UG-84 MDMT) — in-house or subcontract

Welding & Heat Treatment

  • Weld process, size, and joint count drive labor and consumables
  • Weld Position — flat, horizontal, vertical, or overhead, each with its own productivity multiplier (overhead genuinely takes longer, not just harder)
  • PWHT — furnace, local induction, or local resistance, with hold/ramp hours and thermocouple setup
  • NDE — RT, UT, MT, PT, PMI, VT, VB — in-house time or subcontract cost, with a coverage % for random/spot examination instead of assuming every joint is tested
  • Preheat/interpass temperature and filler metal classification (AWS A5.x)

Heat Exchangers & Structural

  • TEMA Class B/C/R — tube-to-tubesheet joints, expanded or welded
  • Baffle and tie-rod bundle assembly, priced separately from shell fabrication
  • Expansion joint (bellows) labor premium — thin-wall material costs differently than shell plate
  • AISC structural steel, bolt grade, and moment-connection labor premium
  • Welder ID, heat/lot number, MTR reference, and CRN/National Board tracking

Machining & Precision Work

  • Drilling, boring, and CNC milling — cost keyed to hole count, hole size, and axis count (2/3/4/5-axis)
  • Lathe/turning, priced by diameter and length
  • Tolerance Class — standard, precision, or high-precision, each with its own time multiplier
  • Cutting — plasma, oxyfuel, saw, laser, or waterjet, each with its own speed and machine rate
  • Deep-hole boring for large forgings — bore diameter and depth, priced separately from routine hole boring
  • API 16A / 16AR well-control equipment (BOP bodies, rams, bonnets) — Temperature Class, PSL level, and rated working pressure tracked per line, with PSL driving inspection time
  • Outsourced machining priced as a flat subcontract cost, not forced through the shop rate

Sheet Metal & Finishing

  • Press-brake forming with bend-deduction and K-factor flat-pattern calculation
  • Pipe bending and polishing, priced per operation
  • Coating — standard, epoxy, or marine-grade — and cleaning — degrease, pickle/passivate, or sandblast
  • Galvanizing and dimensional/QC inspection, tracked as their own line items

Shop & Business Tools

  • Material nesting, cut optimization, and drop/leftover inventory
  • Import from Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD, AutoCAD Plant 3D, Cadworks, and other CAD BOM/Material List exports (CSV/Excel) — keyword-based column auto-detection with malformed-row protection, and remembers a corrected layout so a recurring client format is never mapped twice
  • Standby connector for subscribers already on Autodesk Platform Services (BIM 360/ACC) — pull a model's properties directly once your own APS credentials are provided
  • QuickBooks Online sync, PO generation, and job travelers
  • Business Intelligence dashboard — estimate vs. actual, realized margin, and suggested rate adjustments when a cost category runs consistently high or low across completed jobs
  • Subcontractor Bid Comparison — invite multiple named vendor bids per subcontracted operation (NDE, PWHT, hardness testing, galvanizing, outsourced machining); the winning bid feeds the estimate directly instead of a flat shop-wide rate
  • Free steel PPI market reference (FRED / U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), auto-refreshed in the background — a trend signal for when it's time to revisit your own material rates, never applied automatically
  • Rate profiles taggable by region (e.g. separate Alberta/Texas rate sets), with a flagged warning when a profile hasn't been touched in 60+ days — the same "flag stale data" discipline serious commercial cost databases like RSMeans build their update cadence around
  • Local activity log — who saved, deleted, or bulk-applied what and when, for shops where more than one person shares the same installation
  • Cloud Sync presence notification — see who else recently worked on a shared project, and get warned before overwriting a teammate's newer save

Estimate Classification & Quoting

  • AACE 18R-97 Estimate Class 1–5 — contingency tied to the classification you actually pick, not a flat guess
  • Expected Accuracy Range printed on every quote (e.g. -20%/+30% for a Class 3 budget estimate)
  • Governing Code reference — ASME B31.3 / Sec. VIII Div. 1 / Sec. IX, AWS D1.1, AISC 360, API 650 / 620, CSA W47.1 / G40.21 / S16
  • Set per job, not per shop profile — never a stale classification left over from someone else's quote
  • Revision history — snapshot the full BOM at any point with a note on what changed, printed on the client quote, and restorable at any time
Product lines

Priced for the work you actually quote.

Two focused product lines. Pick one at setup — and yes, you can change your mind later.

LINE 01

Welding & Fabrication and Machining Precision

Structural, piping, and pressure-equipment work — welding, PWHT, NDE, TEMA heat exchangers, and precision machining.

  • ASME B31.3 / Sec. VIII Div. 1 / Sec. IX costing
  • TEMA shell & tube heat exchangers
  • AISC structural steel
  • CNC machining, boring, turning
LINE 02

Custom Fabrication & Shop Work

Sheet goods, enclosures, and general shop fabrication — SMACNA ductwork, fire/smoke dampers, and custom assemblies.

  • SMACNA duct pressure & leakage class
  • Fire/smoke damper UL rating premium
  • Sheet metal forming & plate work
  • Enclosures and custom assembly costing
Pricing

One license. No per-seat surprises.

Subscribe monthly or save with annual billing. Cancel anytime — no annual contract to break.

Free download — no obligation. Full access for 30 days. No sales call required.
BILLED ANNUALLY
$129/month
$1,548 billed once a year
  • Full operation-by-operation costing engine
  • One hardware-locked license, transferable up to 2×/year
  • PDF, Excel, and job traveler exports
  • QuickBooks Online sync
Start the free trial
BILLED MONTHLY
$159/month
No annual commitment
  • Same full costing engine, no feature gate
  • One hardware-locked license, transferable up to 2×/year
  • PDF, Excel, and job traveler exports
  • QuickBooks Online sync
Start the free trial