Building an Instant Manufacturing Quote Engine: The TopProto Case Study
How we engineered a real-time pricing system that parses 3D CAD files and returns instant manufacturing quotes — cutting manual quoting time by 90%.
TopProto is an on-demand manufacturing platform for rapid prototyping, CNC machining, injection molding and 3D printing, live at topproto.com. Before this build, getting a manufacturing quote meant waiting on a human to review your CAD file — sometimes for days. The ask was to make that instant.
The problem
Accurately pricing a 3D CAD file in real time is a genuinely hard engineering problem, not just a form with a price field. The file's geometry — surface area, volume, feature complexity — has to feed into a pricing model that also accounts for material choice, machining process and turnaround time, and it all has to happen in seconds after upload, not as an overnight batch job.
What we built
We built the quoting engine as Node.js microservices that handle geometric file parsing, connected to a responsive React/Next.js frontend. When a file is uploaded, it's analyzed for geometry and complexity, run through a pricing algorithm that factors in the material selection matrix and process type, and an instant quote comes back to the buyer — with order and quote history stored in PostgreSQL and uploaded files handled through AWS S3.
- ▸Node.js microservices for geometric CAD file analysis.
- ▸A real-time pricing algorithm factoring material, process and turnaround.
- ▸PostgreSQL for order and quote history.
- ▸AWS S3 for CAD file storage and retrieval.
The result
Manual quoting time dropped by 90%. That's not a UX polish number — it directly freed up the engineering team's time to focus on actual production instead of manual estimation, and it turned instant quotes into a real conversion advantage over competitors still running manual review queues.