Why Nobody Publishes Prices (and Why We Do)

Custom software pricing is scope-dependent, and vendors worry that a published number will either scare away small projects or anchor large ones too low. So the industry defaults to "book a call." The result is that engineering managers trying to build a budget line have nothing to work with except a sales process.

We publish our ranges here and on our pricing page because a range is enough to answer the question that actually matters at the budgeting stage: is this a $10K conversation or a $100K conversation? The exact figure comes from scoping, but you should not need a discovery call to know which order of magnitude you are in.

The Four Price Bands

Nearly every CAD automation project we see falls into one of four bands, defined by what the system has to do rather than which industry it serves:

  1. CAD plugin / add-in: $5,000 to $25,000. A custom command, panel, or tool inside AutoCAD, Inventor, SolidWorks, or Revit: batch operations, standards enforcement, title-block automation, import/export pipelines. One platform, focused scope, delivered as a signed installer your IT team can roll out.
  2. Variant drawing automation: $15,000 to $50,000. Rule-driven generation of drawing sets, BOMs, and documentation for a product family: parameters in, released drawing package out. This is the band most engineer-to-order manufacturers land in first.
  3. Web-based product configurator: $30,000 to $100,000+. A browser-based system your sales team, dealers, or customers use directly: configuration rules, pricing, CAD/BOM generation on a server, no CAD seats or training required for the people using it.
  4. Enterprise integration: $50,000 to $150,000+. Automation wired into the systems around it: ERP (SAP, NetSuite, Odoo, Dynamics), PDM/PLM, analysis tools like PLS-Pole, and fabrication systems like Tekla PowerFab. This turns point automation into a quote-to-production pipeline.
These bands stack rather than exclude each other. A common path: start with variant drawing automation for engineering, then extend the same rules engine into a customer-facing configurator a year later. The second project reuses the first one's logic.

What Drives Cost Up or Down

Two projects in the same band can sit at opposite ends of it. These are the factors that actually move the number, roughly in order of impact:

  • Rule complexity, the biggest driver. "Scale these dimensions by input" is the bottom of a band. "Select components, restructure the assembly, and verify against a design code" is the top. Count your decision points, not your drawings: a hundred sheets generated by ten rules is a smaller project than ten sheets governed by two hundred rules.
  • The state of your templates and standards. Clean, parametric master models and consistent drawing standards can cut weeks from a build. If templates need rework before automation can drive them, that preparation is real scope: worth doing, but worth budgeting honestly.
  • Number of CAD platforms and output formats. Each additional platform (or deliverable format a customer demands) adds an output layer. The rules are written once; the outputs are engineered per platform.
  • Integrations. Every system the automation reads from or writes to (ERP, PDM, analysis software) adds interface work and testing. Integration effort is often underestimated in vendor quotes; ask for it as a line item.
  • Who operates it. A tool for two trained engineers needs a functional UI. A tool for a dealer network needs onboarding flows, permissions, and error handling for people who have never seen CAD. Same rules, different surface area.

Cost vs the Alternatives

A project fee only makes sense relative to the other ways of spending that money:

  • Subscription automation tools (DriveWorks-class) run roughly $5,000–$20,000 per year depending on tier and seats. Cheaper in year one than a custom build; the lines cross around year two to three, after which the subscription keeps costing and the owned system does not. The single-CAD limitation is part of the same trade; see our DriveWorks alternatives guide for that decision in full.
  • Enterprise CPQ platforms commonly reach six figures annually in licensing before implementation services. They solve a broader commercial problem. If your bottleneck is engineering documentation, you would be buying the wrong product at ten times the price.
  • Hiring another drafter costs $60,000–$90,000 per year, every year, and adds linear capacity: one more person's output. Automation adds capacity that scales with demand and does not resign, but it only replaces the repetitive share of the work. The honest comparison is against the hours actually spent on repeat drawings.
  • Doing nothing is the alternative most teams are actually funding. Its price is below.

The Payback Math

The budgeting question is never really "what does it cost" but "what does it return against what it costs." The arithmetic is short. Take a mid-sized engineering team:

  • 6 engineers spending 10 hours per week each on repetitive CAD work
  • At a $75/hour loaded cost, that is $4,500 per week
  • Over 46 working weeks: roughly $207,000 per year. Call it $180,000+ after allowing for the share automation cannot touch
3–6 months
Typical payback period for a variant drawing automation project priced in the $15,000–$50,000 band, for a team matching the profile above, before counting error reduction or faster quote turnaround.

Run your own numbers rather than ours: the ROI calculator does this arithmetic with your team size, hours, and rates, and our guide to calculating automation ROI covers the second-order effects (errors, rework, quote speed) that usually dwarf the hourly savings.

How to Budget: Prototype First

The lowest-risk way to spend on automation is in two phases. Phase one is a scoped prototype on a single product family, typically three to six weeks, that proves the rules, generates real drawings from real orders, and gives you a working demonstration for stakeholders. Phase two is the production build, and its quote is now grounded in a working system instead of a proposal document.

Budget-wise, this means you commit the low end of a band to learn whether the top end is justified. It also surfaces template and standards problems while they are cheap to fix. We structure engagements this way deliberately; the phased approach is described on our how we work page.

Questions to Ask Any Vendor (Including Us)

Whatever quote you receive, these questions expose the parts of automation pricing where projects actually go wrong:

  1. Do we own the source code, and is it documented? If the answer is no, the real price includes permanent dependence on the vendor. Ownership should be in the contract, not implied.
  2. What happens at the next CAD version upgrade? Automation built on official APIs survives upgrades with minor maintenance; screen-scraping and recorded macros do not. Ask which yours is.
  3. Is template preparation included or assumed? The most common source of mid-project cost growth. Get it scoped explicitly.
  4. What is the maintenance model after delivery? A healthy answer is a modest support arrangement or hourly maintenance, not a mandatory subscription that recreates the licensing model you were avoiding.
  5. Can we see a comparable system running? Not slides: a system. Any vendor with production deployments can show one.

If you want a number for your specific workflow rather than a range, that is exactly what our free automation audit produces: your workflows mapped, the automation candidates ranked, and effort estimated per phase, with the same published ranges above as the frame. Request a free automation audit, or start with the pricing guide.