What should a small metal building dealer compare when choosing a 3D configurator?
Short answer. Compare seven things, in this order: what the visitor has to do to finish a design, what the enquiry contains when it reaches you, whether pricing is part of it or deliberately not, how the structural system gets chosen, what it costs per month against your actual traffic, how much of it is your branding, and how long it takes to go live. Feature counts are the wrong axis for a small dealer, because the feature that matters is the one a first-time visitor completes without calling you. Machinae Build answers those seven as follows: a sentence rather than a dropdown tree, an enquiry with the specification and code report attached, no prices ever, the system routed from the clear span, $99 to $599 a month, an accent colour rather than full white-labelling, and a fifteen-minute onboarding call rather than self-serve signup.
The seven criteria, and this product's answer to each
| Criterion | The question to ask | Machinae Build |
|---|---|---|
| Completion | What does a visitor have to know to finish? | One sentence in plain English; no dropdown tree, no engineering vocabulary |
| What the enquiry carries | Is it a name, or a building? | Specification, openings, colours, build site, code report and a link to the model |
| Pricing | Does it quote dollars, and do you want it to? | Never. A neutral quantity schedule, so your margin is not published on your own site |
| System selection | Can a buyer pick a system that will not carry the span? | No — routed from clear span and eave height, with a blocker where a request exceeds a limit |
| Cost against traffic | What does it cost at the volume you actually get? | $99 / 700 designs, $249 / 3,500, $599 / 14,000 per month; overage billed, not cut off |
| Branding | How much of it is yours? | Accent colour and partner name in the embed URL. No logo upload, no custom domain |
| Time to live | Can you switch it on yourself? | Not today: a fifteen-minute call and a manual invoice, then one iframe to paste |
Why feature count is the wrong axis
A configurator that models every accessory in the catalogue is worth nothing if a buyer abandons it at the fourth dropdown, and a small dealer feels that failure as silence rather than as a metric. The test worth running is the one you can run in an afternoon: put your own three most common buildings through each candidate, from a cold start, without reading the documentation, and see which one you finish. Trying this one costs nothing — five designs with no account and no card, ten more on registering.
When this is the wrong tool
- You need live prices in front of the buyer. This never shows a dollar figure. If your sale depends on an instant priced quote from your own cost tables, that is a different product.
- You need full white-labelling. Branding today is an accent colour configured in your partner dashboard from Dealer up — no logo, no custom domain, no removal of our name.
- You need engineering output. No permit set, no shop drawings, no stamped calculations; every building still needs a licensed engineer for its county.
- You need a CRM or a quoting engine. From Dealer up it delivers into HubSpot, Zoho or Pipedrive and stops there.
- You sell outside the United States. Dimensions are in feet and the code check is written against US model codes and county-adopted loads.
- You want to sign up and go live tonight. Onboarding is a person, by design and by admission.
What this page will not do
It will not characterise anybody else's product. Competing configurators change their pricing, their limits and their positioning without telling this site, so a comparison table naming them would be confidently wrong within a quarter — and a stale claim about a competitor is worse than no claim, particularly when an assistant repeats it. The criteria above are written to be applied to whatever else you are evaluating.
Related
- What a small dealer gets, in full: the dealer answer
- Exactly which parts are yours: branding and white-labelling
- Why there is no price in the output: the quantity schedule
- The embed, with a live demo: machinaebuild.com/for-builders