Projects and Parts

A Part is one design you own. A Project is a folder you can put parts in. That is the whole model — and the important half is that neither one costs you anything or commits you to anything.

Why a Part is separate from a request for a price

Most quoting tools throw your file away with the quote. Here the design is the durable thing and the request is the temporary one: upload once, quote as many times as you like. A part outlives every quotation taken against it.

That matters in practice. Six months after you first priced a bracket, you can open the same part, send it to four different shops, and compare against what you paid last time — without hunting for the file on an old laptop.

What is in a Part

• The design file. Usually an STL. You can upload it, or point at a link you host yourself — some buyers prefer that, and shops fetch it from there once they hold a request.
• Measurements. Volume, surface area and bounding box, worked out in your browser. Shops add their own measurements later when they look at the geometry properly.
• Requirements. Process, material, quantity, and the free-text notes that carry everything a shape cannot — tolerances, finish, what the part has to survive.
• Reference files. Drawings, photographs, a PDF of the assembly. Anything that helps a shop understand the job.
• Its quotations. Every request ever raised against this part, with what each shop said.

What a Part's status means

• Draft — created, not yet complete enough to send out.
• Ready — it has what a shop needs to price it.
• Quoting — at least one request is live and waiting on shops.
• In production — an order from this part is being made.
• Completed — an order from this part was delivered.
• Archived — hidden from the list. Nothing is deleted, and you can show archived parts again with the filter at the top of Parts.

Projects: folders, not commitments

A project groups the parts that belong to one job — Drone frame v2, Line 3 retrofit, Diwali order. It has a name and a description and does nothing else. It does not change prices, it does not group your orders, and it is not shown to sellers.

Projects are optional. Parts can sit unfiled indefinitely, and you can move a part into a project — or create the project during the move — at any point from the part itself.

A workflow that works

• One part per physical component, not per file version. When you revise the geometry, replace the file on the existing part so its quoting history stays in one place.
• Name it the way you would say it out loud. Motor mount v3 beats final_final_2.stl when you are looking at forty parts.
• Archive rather than delete. Archived parts keep their quoting history, which is the record of what this component has cost you over time.

In short

Upload a design once as a Part and it stays yours to re-quote whenever you like. Use Projects if folders help you, ignore them if they do not, and ask for a price when the part is ready.