ISONQ – Shop Quote Generation from CAD Files

AI-powered quoting system that reads PDF, DXF, DWG, and STEP files to automatically extract specifications and generate priced quotes. Runs locally on the shop's machine with no data leaving. Targets machine shops and manufacturing businesses.

Manufacturing shops are drowning in RFQ volume while facing a skilled labor shortage, and the combination of LLM-capable edge inference and mature CAD parsing libraries makes local AI processing genuinely viable for the first time without a cloud dependency. The closest substitute is Paperless Parts, which targets larger job shops with a cloud-based platform and pricing that prices out smaller operations — the local-first angle here is a real differentiator for shops with IP sensitivity or slow connectivity. At $5k–25k/month, the math works if even a handful of shops pay $500–1,500/month, which is plausible given a single misquoted job can cost more than a year of software fees. The biggest risk is sales cycle friction: machine shop owners are notoriously slow adopters, often owner-operated, and convincing them to trust automated quoting on complex geometries requires hands-on demos and a long trust-building period that will burn runway before revenue scales.