# Is Machinae Build metal building quoting software? **Short answer.** No, and the distinction matters. It produces a **quote-grade quantity schedule** — neutral measurements a supplier can price — and stops deliberately one step short of both a bill of materials and an estimate. It never outputs a dollar figure. What it removes is the part where a quote takes three days because nobody agrees what building is being quoted. ## What it produces - **Areas, lengths and counts** measured off the building the customer is actually looking at: footprint, wall and roof areas, trim and gutter lengths, opening counts. - **In feet** — `ft`, `ft2`, `ea` — because the spec, the renderer and the market are in feet. Metric is a display conversion, never stored. - **Against a frozen revision**, not arbitrary client JSON: a quote must reference bytes that cannot change under it afterwards. - **As CSV**, plus GLB and PDF artifacts, queued from that frozen revision and produced where artifact export is enabled for the deployment. - **With provenance on every item**, so a reviewer can tell a calculated figure from a supplier's claim. ## What it deliberately does not produce - **No prices. Ever**, in the measurement path. - **No member schedules.** How many purlins at what gauge is a function of the supplier's system, their span tables and an engineer's signature. Publishing a guess would invite it to be mistaken for a fabrication BOM, which is the single most expensive confusion available in this product. - **No waste, laps or trim allowances.** A supplier's panel width sets their lap and their yard sets their waste factor. Items that need it are marked for the supplier to apply and left net. - **No labour, freight, tax or margin.** - **No proposal document, e-signature or payment collection.** ## Why "quote-grade" and not "estimate" An estimate carries somebody's cost assumptions. A quantity schedule carries measurements. Handing a supplier measurements they can price with their own numbers is faster than handing them an estimate they have to unpick — and it cannot be mistaken for a fabrication document, which is the failure mode worth designing against. ## What it does before the quote The building is code-checked first: the structural system is routed from the clear span, and the check names the standard behind each item. So the quantity schedule is measured off a building that has already been told, for example, that a 16 ft or wider opening needs an engineered header, or that a cold-formed truss clear span of 60 ft or more triggers special inspection under IBC 2206 / 1705.2.5. ## Related - What the 3D output actually is: [the outputs, in detail](https://machinaebuild.com/answers/3d-metal-building-configurator) - Why this is not a CRM either: [CRM and lead management](https://machinaebuild.com/answers/metal-building-crm-software) Last reviewed 2026-08-23 against the code. Reviewed against `services/quantities/takeoff.js` and `services/artifacts/`.