Type or say what the customer wants. Printcore asks only what's missing, prices it from your own materials and costs, and turns it into a job.
Whether you quote from a spreadsheet or pay for an MIS that still needs one, these usually come up in the first five minutes of a setup call.
Pricing lives in the owner's head or one estimator's spreadsheet. When they're out, quotes stop.
Customers email three shops, and the first good price usually wins. A two-day turnaround loses work.
Prices are guessed or copied from last time. Ink, waste, labor and finishing get missed.
Email to estimate, estimate to work order, work order to the accounting software.
Nobody knows how long the job will really take, or what's holding up the floor.
Legacy MIS charges per seat, takes months to set up, and nobody uses half of it.
Each fix is a real part of the product your shop uses on day one, not a roadmap item.
| The problem | Printcore's answer | What does it |
|---|---|---|
| Only one person can quote | Anyone on the team asks Printcore in plain English and gets a price built from the owner's rules. | Ask Printcore and 6 quoting calculatorsHow the AI estimator works |
| Slow quotes lose jobs | Customer email to priced quote in about 60 seconds, then approved online. | Email-to-quote and the customer portalWalkthrough: email to quote |
| Not sure we made money | Every line shows material, ink, labor, equipment and margin. The price is checked against similar past jobs before it goes out. | AI price check with confidence levels, plus roll and sheet nestingNesting the roll before pricing |
| Typing everything three times | One record goes quote → job → schedule → shipping label → invoice. | Accounting software sync and Shippo labels for USPS, UPS and FedExWalkthrough: outsourced work and POs |
| The schedule is a guess | Jobs split into operations on your stations. Time estimates correct themselves after every job. | Patent-pending adaptive estimates and production autopilotWalkthrough: production |
| Expensive software that still needs a spreadsheet | Unlimited users, set up in a 1-hour call, and one-click AI reports that read your sales, customers, inventory and production and tell you what to change. | Flat pricing, the setup assistant, AI business and production reportsWalkthrough: reports |
AI at every step: it reads the request, prices the quote, checks the artwork, plans production, and learns from every finished job, so the next quote and schedule are closer.
Printcore asks what's missing, prices it from your costs, and turns it into the job.
“Indoor or outdoor?”, not “coroplast or ACM?” Anyone at the counter can answer it, and anything it already knows, it doesn't ask.
Your own calculators do the math from your materials and production costs. The AI picks the inputs and checks the result against similar jobs, and when there's no history it says so.
Last order's specs and what they usually pay. “13oz with hems and grommets again?” is one question instead of five, and the price gets checked against their history.
Your newest hire can quote like your best estimator.
Whether you're quoting from a spreadsheet or a legacy MIS, here's what actually changes.
| Question | Spreadsheet | Legacy MIS | Printcore |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to quote | Whenever the person who knows the pricing gets to it. | Screen after screen of specs for each line. | Describe the job; a priced quote in about a minute. |
| Who can quote | Usually the owner or one estimator. | Whoever has been trained on the estimating screens. | Anyone on the team, using the owner's pricing rules. |
| Price accuracy | Copied from last time. Ink, waste and finishing get missed. | Only as good as rate tables someone keeps up to date. | Built from your materials, ink, labor and equipment, then checked against similar past jobs. |
| Double entry | Retyped into the work order and the accounting software. | Often still re-keyed into accounting or a side spreadsheet. | One record from quote to invoice. Works with most accounting software packages. |
| Setup time | None, but nothing is connected. | Weeks to months, often with paid onboarding. | A 1-hour setup call. You quote a real job before it ends. |
| Per-seat fees | None. | Commonly priced per user. | Unlimited users on every plan. |
| Learns from your jobs | No. | Fixed time standards someone has to maintain. | Time estimates correct themselves after every job (patent pending). |
| Conversational quoting | No. | Form-based. A few vendors are piloting chatbots. | Type or say the job. Printcore asks only what's missing. |
An email comes in, gets priced, is approved online and lands on the schedule. The second tour picks up on the shop floor and in the reports.
Printcore runs every job, every day, at Paramount Graphics, our wide-format shop in Cumming, Georgia. The quoting, the schedule and the customer portal on this page are the same ones we use on our own work, so when something slows us down, it gets fixed.
Bruce Campanelli, founder. Nearly 30 years in offset, digital and wide-format production. Printcore is the system he wanted on his own floor.
Sebastian Triantis, customer relations. He helped test and build Printcore, and he's the person you'll work with as a customer: sebastian@printcore.ai. More about us
We set your shop up with you, live. You leave the call with a real quote, not a to-do list.
Every plan starts with a free setup call and a 2-week trial of every feature, including Ask Printcore. No credit card, and unlimited team members on every plan.
Customers paying invoices online (card or ACH, any plan): Stripe's standard processing fee, plus a 1% Printcore fee capped at $25 per payment.
Company store card orders (Pro): Stripe's standard processing fee, plus a 1% Printcore platform fee. Payments go straight to your own Stripe account.
No. Your prices come from your own calculators, materials and production costs. The AI's job is to pick the inputs and check the result: it compares each quote with similar jobs you've done and, once a customer has a few jobs on record, with what that customer usually pays. It tells you how many jobs it looked at, and when there's no history it says so instead of guessing.
About an hour, and we do it with you on a free Zoom setup call. The setup assistant builds your equipment stations from a one-sentence description of your shop, seeds standard print-industry materials and products, and sets regional tax and pricing defaults. Most shops quote a real job before the call ends.
Yes. Paste or upload a price list or rate card and Printcore imports it. You can also bring in past invoices, and the AI uses them to suggest prices and check new quotes against what you've actually charged.
Very likely. Printcore works with most accounting software packages and the major CRMs, on every plan. It syncs customers both ways, can import historical invoices to power pricing suggestions, and creates the invoice when a job completes. Shipping rates and labels come from USPS, UPS and FedEx through Shippo.
It's yours. Printcore's AI runs on business AI services, including Claude from Anthropic, under terms that don't let them train their models on your data. Your job history prices your quotes and nobody else's. Industry benchmarking is opt-in and only ever shares anonymized averages, and you can export quotes, customers and reports to CSV at any time, during or after your trial.
Quoting works the way they'd describe the job to a coworker, so there are no prompts to learn, and every AI report is one click. Add as many team members as you need with role-based permissions and no per-seat fees. Operators get their own “My Work” list on the production schedule, and every finished operation makes the next time estimate better.
It replaces the retyping, not the person. Printcore drafts the quote; your team checks it, changes whatever they want and decides when it goes out. The people who know your shop stay in charge. They just stop doing data entry.
No. Book a free 1-hour setup call, we set your shop up with you on Zoom, and your 2-week trial starts when setup is done. The trial includes every feature: Ask Printcore, production, portals, company stores and reports. You only choose a plan if you decide to stay.
Yes, on the Pro plan. Customers get an online portal for approvals, artwork and order status. You can also open a company store for any customer: their logo already on each item at one fixed price, spending limits and approvals, and orders billed to their account. For teams, schools and fundraisers, a sponsored store lets each person pay by card through your own Stripe account. Card orders carry Stripe's normal processing fee plus a 1% Printcore platform fee.
Every time an operation completes, Printcore compares the actual recorded time against its estimate and applies a correction to future estimates of that operation type. Your quotes and schedules get measurably more accurate the longer you use it, with no time-standard spreadsheets to maintain.
A free 1-hour setup call, then 2 weeks with every feature.