Printcore is an AI print estimator built for commercial print, sign and wide-format shops. A customer emails an RFQ; the estimator reads it, identifies the product, size, substrate and finishing, routes each line to the right calculator, and prices it against your costs. Thirty-five minutes of estimating becomes about thirty seconds.
Most "estimating software" is a pricing matrix with a nicer interface — you still type every dimension by hand. An AI print estimator removes the typing. Here is a real shape of request and what comes back.
| Line | Routed to | Qty |
|---|---|---|
| Banner 48×96, 13oz, hem + grommets | Wide format | 3 |
| Coroplast sign 24×36 + H-stake | Wide format | 2 |
| Window decal 12×12, cut vinyl | Cut vinyl | 50 |
| Priced against your substrate & labour costs | 3 engines | < 30s |
Each line arrives sized, matched to a material in your inventory, and priced. Confidence scores flag anything ambiguous so you review the one line that needs a human, not all twelve.
Work the numbers yourself. This runs the same arithmetic any wide-format estimate rests on — material with waste, press time, finishing by linear foot, then markup. Every rate is editable because the only rates that matter are yours.
A general-purpose AI can write you a paragraph about banners. It cannot nest a roll. Each engine below carries the production maths for its own process.
Live roll nesting with rotation and waste percentage shown in the estimate. Substrates priced from your inventory, including a connected supplier catalogue.
Enter make, model and year. The estimator classifies the vehicle and sizes the wrap from that, rather than asking you to measure panels.
Weeding complexity tiers, automatic quantity breaks, and both per-piece and effective cost per square foot.
Full internal cost chain — paper, clicks, binding, overhead multiplier, rush multiplier, markup — with live margin as you change any of it.
Press-sheet imposition visuals, click costs and run-length breaks, so the estimate reflects how the sheet actually lays out.
Per-letter construction costs for a category most estimating tools leave to a spreadsheet on someone's desktop.
Every estimating system drifts. Standards get set once, the shop changes, and nobody goes back to retune them — so quotes quietly get wronger for years.
Printcore compares the actual recorded time on each completed operation against what it estimated, and applies a correction to future estimates of that operation type. No manual time-standard maintenance. The estimator gets measurably more accurate the longer the shop runs on it.
Reading an email quickly is useful. Pricing it correctly is what protects margin. An estimator that never learns from your production floor is guessing faster, not guessing better — and a fast wrong number is worse than a slow one, because you send more of them.
An AI print estimator reads a customer's request in plain English — an email, a phone call, a pasted spec — and turns it into a priced, line-itemed estimate without anyone keying it into a pricing matrix. It identifies the product, the size, the substrate, the quantity and the finishing, routes each line to the right calculator, and prices it against your own material and labour costs.
Accuracy depends entirely on whose numbers it uses. Printcore prices against your material costs, your equipment speeds, your labour rates and your markup — not an industry average. It then compares the actual recorded time on every completed operation against its own estimate and corrects future estimates of that operation type, so accuracy improves with every job you run.
Yes. Printcore has six estimating engines: wide format, digital press and offset, booklets, vehicle wraps, cut vinyl, and channel letters. The wrap estimator classifies the vehicle from make, model and year and sizes the wrap from that. Wide format shows live roll nesting with rotation and waste percentage.
Yours. During setup Printcore can pull historical invoices from your accounting package to seed pricing suggestions, and you set your own substrate costs, equipment speeds, overhead multiplier and markup. Generic pricing would produce generic margins, which is the problem most estimating tools never solve.
Seconds for the AI to read the request and produce priced line items. The realistic end-to-end figure — including a human glancing at it and hitting send — is under a minute, against the thirty-plus minutes a manual estimate typically takes.
No. That's the point. Every shop gets a dedicated quote email address, so customers keep emailing the way they always have. You can also paste text, describe a job out loud, or let the phone assistant take a quote request from a caller.
Free for 30 days, every feature included. Set up in roughly 15 minutes — describe your shop in a sentence and the AI builds your equipment stations, materials and pricing defaults.
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