Work out what a machined part should cost at a local machine shop — in millimetres, with material, machine time, CAM programming, setup, finishing and inspection broken out separately. Milled blocks, turned shafts and bored bushings are costed differently, because they are made differently. Then see the part most calculators leave out: where the unit price actually stops falling as quantity goes up.
Every rate the model uses is published further down, so you can check it against what a shop near you actually charges. The figures are set at established workshop rates rather than the cheapest possible ones — a number that is too low is useless, because you cannot take it to your own supplier and it makes every honest quote look expensive.
Built and maintained by EKINSUN, a custom parts manufacturer working with qualified machining partners in Guangdong, China. We machine the parts these numbers describe. Send a STEP file or a PDF drawing if you have one — and if you do not, a dimensioned sketch, a photo with a caliper, or the worn part itself is equally fine. One piece for a prototype or a breakdown, or a blanket order with scheduled call-offs when the volume is real. Quote in 12 h.
// Cost Estimator — material · size in mm · quantity
The smallest box your finished part fits inside — not the part's own volume. A shop buys that box in solid plate or bar and cuts everything else away, which is why a hollow part and a solid one of the same size start from the same blank.
Free, no sign-up. Send a STEP file, a PDF drawing, a sketch or a photo — all four work equally well. One piece or ten thousand. Real quote back within 12 h.
// WHERE THE MONEY GOES — updates with your inputs
That is what your 60 × 40 × 25 mm part in Aluminium 6061-T6 costs at 1 pc at a local machine shop — the number worth comparing against. We machine the same part from a sketch or a photo, with no CAD file, and send you the actual figure within 12 hours. Send what you have →
Of the €283 per part above, €18.00 is the Aluminium 6061-T6 itself — about 6%. The other €265 is hours: cutting, programming, setup and inspection, all billed at a workshop rate. That is the part of the number that is negotiable, and it is the part we change.
Nothing about the part changes: same drawing, same material specification, same tolerances, same inspection. What changes is the rate those hours are billed at. EKINSUN is a custom manufacturing and OEM project partner in Guangdong, China, working with qualified machining partners — the same part, made to the same drawing, on a different cost base.
How much less it comes to depends entirely on the part — a simple turned bush and a five-axis housing do not move by the same amount, and we would rather send you a real figure than a percentage we invented. Send the drawing, sketch, or photo and you get an actual quote within 12 hours. If it is not worth switching for, we will tell you that too.
Get the Same Part Priced →This is the table almost no cost calculator shows you, and it is the one that decides how you should order. Setup is paid once no matter how many parts come off the machine, so the unit price falls fast at the start and then goes flat. The last column measures each quantity against the volume floor — what the part would cost if setup were spread over an infinite order, leaving only material, cutting and finishing. Once you are within about 15% of that floor, buying more quantity is no longer buying you a lower price.
| Quantity | Cost per part | Order total | Saving vs 1 pc | Above volume floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 pc | €283 | €283 | — | +443% |
| 5 pc | €92.55 | €463 | −67% | +77% |
| 10 pc | €69.79 | €698 | −75% | +34% |
| 25 pc | €56.56 | €1,414 | −80% | +8% |
| 50 pc | €54.36 | €2,718 | −81% | +4% |
| 100 pc | €53.26 | €5,326 | −81% | +2% |
Figures above are for the calculator's starting example — a 60 × 40 × 25 mm aluminium 6061 part, two setups, general tolerance. Change the inputs and the table recalculates for your own part.
The volume floor for this part is €52.16 per piece — material, cutting, deburring, tooling, inspection and the share of setup that does not amortise away, because a long order still gets released in batches. The curve reaches it at about 25 pieces, where you are within 15% of the floor. Ordering more than that buys you very little, so order what you actually need — MOQ here is 1.
Being straight about the limits is what makes the number useful. The model above prices the part from its bounding box, the material, how many sides get machined, the tolerance band and the finish. That is enough to tell a €20 part from a €200 part, and enough to sanity-check a quote you have received from someone else.
What it cannot see is geometry. A 6 mm slot 40 mm deep, a wall left at 0.8 mm, an internal thread in a blind hole, a cross hole drilled at 37°, or a bore that has to be honed rather than bored — each of these can move the real figure by more than everything the calculator asks about combined. So treat the output as a budget range, not a price.
Every figure the calculator uses is listed here so you can check it against your own experience rather than trusting a black box. Densities are the standard values for each grade. Stock prices are what a supplier charges for a small sawn blank — not the tonnage commodity price, which is why they look high next to the metal exchange figure. When you buy 0.3 kg of 6061 you pay for cutting and handling, not for aluminium. The cutting factor is how much slower a material runs than 6061 on the same machine.
| Material | Density (g/cm³) | Stock price (€/kg) | Cutting factor | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aluminium 6061-T6 | 2.70 | 7 – 12 | 1.0 | Brackets, housings, general machined parts |
| Aluminium 7075-T6 | 2.81 | 14 – 22 | 1.3 | Structural parts needing higher strength |
| Steel S235 / 1018 | 7.85 | 3 – 6 | 1.8 | Weldments, low-cost mild steel parts |
| Steel 42CrMo4 / 4140 | 7.85 | 5 – 10 | 2.3 | Shafts, pins, highly loaded parts |
| Stainless 303 | 8.00 | 9 – 15 | 2.0 | Free-machining stainless, non-welded |
| Stainless 304 | 8.00 | 9 – 15 | 2.8 | General corrosion resistance |
| Stainless 316L | 8.00 | 12 – 20 | 3.2 | Marine, chemical, medical contact |
| Brass CuZn39Pb3 / CW614N (US ≈ C360) | 8.47 | 14 – 22 | 0.7 | Fittings, adapters, electrical parts |
| Titanium Ti-6Al-4V | 4.43 | 60 – 120 | 5.0 | Aerospace, medical, weight-critical |
| POM / Delrin | 1.41 | 9 – 16 | 0.6 | Bushings, gears, low-friction parts |
| Nylon PA6 | 1.14 | 8 – 14 | 0.6 | Wear pads, rollers, guides |
| PEEK | 1.30 | 140 – 260 | 1.2 | High temperature, chemical, medical |
The remaining constants, so nothing is hidden. Machine time is charged at €85/h including the operator, mid-band for an established job shop (roughly €70–110; five-axis and turn-mill run higher). Stock removal is an effective 6 cm³/min when milling 6061 and 12 cm³/min when turning it — deliberately not spindle-in-cut figures, because they also absorb tool changes, rapid moves and probing, and on top of that every part costs 2.5 minutes per setup just to load, clamp, touch off and unload. That is why a part which looks like six minutes of cutting occupies twenty-two minutes of machine time. A single small blank carries a €15 minimum for sawing and handling, which is why one piece never shows a two-euro material line. Inspection is a flat first-article check plus a per-part allowance that grows with the tolerance band you pick.
Four things in the model exist specifically to stop the volume price collapsing to something no shop would ever quote, and they are the reason the curve above flattens where it does rather than heading for the cost of the metal:
| Part shape | Removal rate | CAM programming | First setup | Each extra setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Block, plate, bracket — milled | 6 cm³/min | 45 min | 45 min | 20 min |
| Round bar, shaft, pin — turned | 12 cm³/min | 30 min | 30 min | 15 min |
| Tube, ring, bushing — turned & bored | 12 cm³/min | 35 min | 35 min | 15 min |
| Irregular or unknown | 5 cm³/min | 60 min | 55 min | 25 min |
Turning is cheaper than milling for the same envelope and it is worth understanding why, because it changes how you should describe your part to any supplier. A lathe cuts continuously with the workpiece spinning, so it clears stock at roughly twice the rate of an end mill taking bites out of a block. Chucking a bar takes a fraction of the time it takes to fixture and indicate a block. And a turned profile is far less to program. On top of all that, a cylinder only occupies 78.5% of the box drawn around it — so costing a shaft as though it were a rectangular blank overcharges the material by more than a fifth before any cutting has happened. That is exactly the error a calculator with only L × W × H inputs forces you into.
These are deliberately not the lowest rates available anywhere. A calculator that quietly prices your part at the cheapest possible shop rate hands you a number you cannot use — you cannot take it to your own supplier, and it makes every honest quote you receive look expensive. The figures here are what the part costs at a shop near you, whichever country that is.
Run the search that brought you here and open the first few results. Nearly all of them end the same way: enter your numbers, see a ballpark, then upload a STEP file for a real price. If you have the STEP file, that is fine and we quote from it the same way — most of the parts we make arrive as proper CAD from engineers who know exactly what they want.
The gap opens when the file does not exist. A component broke, the drawing was never digitised, the supplier stopped making it years ago. That job still has to be quoted, and it is the one every instant-quote portal turns away. The table below is the honest comparison of what each route accepts.
| What you actually have | Typical instant-quote site | How EKINSUN handles it |
|---|---|---|
| STEP / IGES / 3D CAD | Accepted — the intended input | Accepted; we quote from it directly |
| 2D PDF drawing only | Often rejected or manual-review queue | Accepted; a dimensioned 2D is enough to machine from |
| Hand sketch with dimensions | Not accepted | Accepted; we redraw it and send the drawing back for your approval before cutting |
| Photo with a caliper or ruler for scale | Not accepted | Accepted; we work out the geometry and confirm the critical dimensions with you |
| The worn or broken part, posted to us | Not accepted | Accepted; measured and reverse engineered, and you get the drawing afterwards |
| You do not know the material | Required field, must be guessed | We identify it from the part — hardness, magnetism, density, machining behaviour |
| You need exactly one piece | Priced, but often with a setup or programming fee on top | MOQ 1, no separate programming fee |
| You need 5,000 a year, called off monthly | Quoted per order; setup often re-charged each time | Blanket order with scheduled call-offs — drawing and CAM program stay archived, so repeats need no new setup |
| You are an engineer costing a design before release | Black-box number, no way to audit it | Every rate this page uses is published above, so you can defend the figure in your own review |
If your row above is one of the highlighted ones, the calculator on this page has already done as much as any calculator can. The next step is a person looking at what you have. Ordering CNC parts with no CAD file explains exactly what happens after you send a sketch or a photo, and reverse engineering from a physical sample covers the case where the part itself is all that is left.
A buyer who sees €283 for one part and €54 each for fifty usually concludes that the shop is punishing small orders. It is simpler than that. A two-sided part carries about an hour of CAM programming and 65 minutes of setup — 45 for the first side, 20 for the second — and that is roughly €206 spent before a single good part exists. At quantity 1 the whole €206 lands on the one part you ordered. At quantity 50 it is about €6. Nothing else changed; the cutting time per part is identical either way.
There is one more thing worth knowing, because it is where a repeat part gets cheap. Programming is only paid the first time. We archive the drawing and the CAM program, so when you reorder the same component in two years it comes back dimensionally identical and that block of the cost is already gone — which is why a second order of the same part is often noticeably cheaper than the first, even at the same quantity.
The practical consequence is that the cheapest quantity is almost never 1, but it is also rarely the largest number you can afford. On a typical two-sided part the curve is within 15% of its floor somewhere around 25 to 50 pieces — beyond that you are mostly buying material and tying up cash. The quantity table above computes that point for your own part rather than leaving you to guess it.
Where a one-off genuinely makes sense: a machine is down and one part is holding up production, a prototype has to be validated before a batch is committed, or the part is a discontinued component with no replacement on the market. We treat all three as normal work. See low-MOQ custom parts for how single pieces are handled here.
At an established machine shop, a one-off milled part in aluminium 6061 that fits in the palm of your hand runs roughly EUR 150 to 350, and the same part in a batch of 50 lands around EUR 35 to 60 each. A turned part of that size is cheaper on both counts — about EUR 135 as a single piece — because a lathe clears stock roughly twice as fast and a round blank holds a fifth less material than the box around it. The spread is wide because programming and setup are fixed costs divided by quantity, and because tolerance, material and the number of setups move the number more than part size does.
Send CAD if you have it — STEP, IGES or a dimensioned PDF drawing all quote fastest, and most of what EKINSUN machines arrives that way from engineers. You do not need it, though. A dimensioned hand sketch, a photo with a caliper or ruler in the frame, or the physical part itself is equally enough for us to quote. Most online instant-quote calculators require a STEP or IGES upload before they will show any price at all, which is a problem when the part you need is a worn component with no drawing left.
Because programming and setup are paid once regardless of quantity. Writing the CAM program takes around 45 minutes on a moderate part, and fixturing, indicating, work offsets and the first-article check add 45 minutes for the first side plus 20 for each further side. At quantity 1 that whole block of roughly two hours sits on one part. At quantity 50 it is spread across 50. This is why the unit price curve falls steeply over the first ten pieces and then flattens out.
It is accurate enough to tell you whether a part is a EUR 20 item or a EUR 200 item, and to show you how much you would save by ordering 10 instead of 1. It is not a quote. It cannot see thin walls, deep narrow pockets, internal threads, cross holes at odd angles or a tolerance that forces a grinding operation, and any one of those can move the real figure substantially.
In order: the number of separate setups, then tolerance, then material. Going from one setup to three roughly doubles machining time because the part must be re-fixtured and re-indicated each time. Tightening from a general tolerance to plus or minus 0.01 mm adds inspection and slower finishing passes. Titanium and 316 stainless cut far slower than 6061 aluminium and wear tooling faster.
The estimate is instant and free, with no sign-up and no file upload. It is not a quote, and no calculator that has never seen your part can honestly call itself one. What it gives you is a defensible budget figure in a few seconds, with every rate it used printed further down the page so you can check the arithmetic. The real quote is a person looking at your drawing, sketch or photo, and it comes back within 12 hours.
One micron is plus or minus 0.001 mm, which is ten times tighter than the tightest setting in this calculator and outside what milling and turning hold at all. Reaching it means a different process chain: grinding, honing or lapping as a finishing operation, inspection on a temperature-stabilised CMM or with air gauging, and a temperature-controlled room, because a 100 mm steel part grows about one micron for every degree of warming. Expect several times the machined cost rather than a percentage uplift, and expect the inspection to be a real share of it. Before committing to that, check whether the drawing genuinely needs one micron on that feature or whether it was copied across the whole part by habit; on most parts only one or two dimensions actually matter that much.
Yes. MOQ at EKINSUN is 1 piece and there is no separate programming fee added on top. Single prototypes, one-off replacements for machines that are still running, and small test batches are ordinary work here rather than an exception we charge extra for. The other end is served too: production quantities run as a blanket order with scheduled call-offs, and because the drawing and the CAM program stay archived, a repeat comes back dimensionally identical without paying for setup and programming again.
The inputs are in millimetres and the output is shown in both EUR and USD. If your drawing is in inches, multiply by 25.4 before entering — or simply send the drawing as it is, since we work in metric and imperial equally and will not ask you to convert anything before quoting.
Whatever you actually have: a CAD file, a PDF drawing, a hand sketch with dimensions, a photo with a caliper for scale, or the old part itself. Plus the quantity, the material if you know it, and the country you want it delivered to. If you do not know the material we can usually identify it from the part. Quotes come back within 12 hours.
Send whatever you have — CAD, PDF, a sketch, or a photo with a caliper. Send a CAD file if you have one — and if you do not, a sketch or a photo works just as well. MOQ 1, reply in 12 h.
Send a drawing, a sketch, or a photo of the part with a caliper next to it — no CAD file needed. MOQ 1, quote back within 12 hours.
Want this priced lower?
SEND THE PART, GET A REAL QUOTE →