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The Quoter · live in production

Instant Quoting & Follow-Up System

“Why does a price that takes two minutes to compute still take until tomorrow to hear?”

  • Live in production
  • Form + email intake
  • Deterministic pricing
  • Follow-up built in

Instant quoting and follow-up, built into a screen-printing shop’s existing website and run under the shop’s own accounts. A customer describes the job the way they would say it at the counter, at any hour, and gets a real price in minutes instead of a call back tomorrow. The first install is live on a working shop’s site today.

The job it replaces

A screen-printing quote is not hard math. It is a short interview: quantity, sizes, garment, ink colors, print locations, artwork status, due date. The owner runs that interview all day at the counter and in the inbox, which means a request that lands Saturday at 9:41pm waits for Monday, and the buyer who needed a number tonight has three other tabs open. The product moves that interview, and only that interview, to software. The judgment calls stay with the owner.

How it works

Two intake channels feed one brain. On the website, a customer types the job in plain language into a quote page. By email, the same reader drafts the reply to a quote request the way the shop would. Either way the request is read against a fifteen-answer checklist (quantity, size breakdown, garment, garment color, locations, inks per location, artwork status, due date, and so on). Whatever the customer covered is done; whatever is missing gets asked, one question at a time, never a form.

Diagram scrolls sideways →

The quoting pipeline: intake, the reader, the shop's pricing table, the quote, and follow-up A website form and the shop's email inbox feed a reader that fills a fifteen-answer checklist and asks for whatever is missing. Everything then passes through the shop's own pricing table, the only source of any dollar figure, into an instant quote. Follow-up runs until the job closes or dies and stops the moment the customer replies. Anything outside the shop's rules is held for the owner instead of guessed. INTAKE the quote page the shop inbox plain language, any hour Saturday, 9:41pm THE READER reads it like the person at the counter 15-answer checklist asks for what is missing, one question at a time never a form THE SHOP’S TABLE THE QUOTE priced in minutes every line traces to the table quantity breaks, fees, rush rules nothing waits for Monday FOLLOW-UP runs in the shop’s voice until the job closes or dies stops the second the customer replies no job dies in the inbox the model never generates a price AI reads and writes the words; the shop’s own table does every piece of math anything outside the rules is held for the owner, never guessed
the pricing table, and what only passes through it flow enforced by architecture
Fig. 1. The pipeline. The one rule the whole product hangs on sits in the middle: every dollar figure comes from the shop’s own deterministic pricing table (garment cost and margin, a print matrix of ink colors by quantity break, screen fees, size upcharges, rush rules, minimums). The model writes sentences. It has no path to inventing a number.

Why the pricing rule is the product

A shop owner’s first question about AI quoting is always some version of “what if it quotes wrong?” It is the right question, and the answer cannot be “it usually doesn’t.” One hallucinated price to a real buyer ends the owner’s trust in the whole system. So the pricing is not a model behavior that has been prompted carefully. It is a table the owner controls, and the model has no other source of numbers. Change a rate in the table and the next quote follows it. Ask how a quote got its total and every line traces back to a row.

The same conservatism runs the edges. Below-minimum runs, from-scratch artwork, five-plus ink colors, embroidery items, and anything due inside the hard rush window are held for the owner instead of guessed. The system quotes the jobs that follow the rules and hands a person the ones that do not, which is exactly the split the counter already runs.

Try it

The demo below is the real reading and pricing logic in one self-contained page, pointed at a generic shop with a sample pricing table. Type a job the way you would say it out loud, watch the checklist fill, and then open the pricing tab and change the rules it just used. The AI reading is simulated inside the file, and every dollar on screen comes from the table.

Open the interactive demo →

The other half of the company

The quoter is the product. The outbound sales operation that sells it is its own system, run daily by scheduled Claude tasks behind a human approval gate, and it has the most honest numbers on this site. Read the approval desk case study →