Rate Cards, Equipment and Materials
Tell the marketplace what you can make and what it costs, so quotes reach you already filtered to work you want.
Three things describe your shop to the marketplace. Equipment is the machines you own. Materials is what you stock. Rate Cards tie one machine to one material and state your price for that combination. Buyers only ever see you through a Rate Card.
Equipment
Under Equipment you add each machine you own: what it is, what process it runs, and its build envelope. Machines are grouped by process — printers, CNC mills, laser and waterjet cutters each have their own page and their own fields, because the numbers that matter are different.
Be honest about the build envelope. It is used to decide whether your shop is even shown a part, so an inflated number wastes your time as much as the buyer's.
Materials
Materials record what you can actually run: the filaments, resins, metals and sheet stock you keep or can reliably source. A buyer asking for nylon will not see a shop that only lists PLA.
Capabilities is the summary view of the same thing — the processes and technologies your shop is claiming overall.
Rate Cards, where the money is
A Rate Card ties one machine to one material and defines your unit economics for that pairing. An active Rate Card is a public promise: it is what a buyer is quoted against when they ask for an instant price, and what seeds the pricing on an RFQ that reaches you.
You will have several — a fast machine in PLA and a slower one in nylon are different economics, and should be different cards.
What to think about when you price
Yantra Bhavan does not set your prices and does not tell other shops what you charge. What goes into a rate that holds up over a year:
- Machine time, including the parts you throw away. If one build in ten fails, your effective hourly cost is higher than your arithmetic says.
- Material, including support and waste. Bought by the kilo, consumed by the gram, and never at 100% efficiency.
- The labour nobody quotes. Setup, removing supports, deburring, inspection and packing are most of the human time on a small order.
- Power and consumables — nozzles, tools, resin trays, cutting fluid.
- What the platform and the government take. A platform fee and GST come off before the money reaches you, and TCS and TDS may apply. Your payout is visible per order in Settlements — price against that number, not the invoice total.
In short
List your machines, list your stock, then create a Rate Card for each pairing you genuinely want work on — with a minimum charge that covers setup. Next: winning RFQs.