Maker Growth Hub

Member tool

Laser Production Planner

The honest answer to "can I take this order" is arithmetic, and it is better to do it before you say yes.

What travels: Your files never leave your machine. The schedule itself is computed on our server: building a plan sends product names, sizes, quantities and your rates — never your cut files — and nothing is stored once the answer comes back.

Part of the Maker Toolkit: fourteen tools that share one shop profile and one product list, so what you set up here is already known everywhere else.

Maker Toolkit v1.0 · August 2026

How it works

Laser Production Planner, step by step

Load the products for a fair or a wholesale order and it works out the machine hours against the time you actually have, how many sheets to buy, what to cut first, and what the run pays. The cut lengths and sheet counts are measured from your real files, not estimated from a guess.

  1. Add your productsOne cut file each. It measures the cut length and the size on the sheet.
  2. Set quantities and pricesWhat you plan to make, and what you sell it for.
  3. Say how many machine hours you haveBe honest. This is the number the plan lives or dies on.
  4. Build the planYou get the verdict, a shopping list, a cut order and the money.

Why it is built this way

The decisions behind it

Machine hours are the real constraintFinishing can move to an evening. Machine time cannot, so the plan is built around it rather than around margin.
It tells you what to dropWhen a run does not fit, it ranks by profit per machine hour — the cheapest way to buy back time. Cutting your lowest-margin line usually costs more.
Sheets are counted, not guessedYour parts are nested for real against your sheet size, so the shopping list is a number you can take to the supplier.

Questions

Laser Production Planner — common questions

How do I know if a custom order will fit my week?

Total the machine hours from your own logged cut speeds, schedule them across the machines you own, and compare against the hours you can honestly work. The planner does that and reports the finish time, so the answer is a number rather than a feeling.

Does it account for more than one machine?

Yes. Machines run in parallel, so two lasers do not simply halve the time when one job is far longer than the rest. The schedule assigns work across your machines and reports the real finish time, including which machine is the bottleneck.

What if the batch does not fit?

You find out while you can still do something about it: quote a longer lead time, cut the order, or reorganise what runs first. That is the entire value of running it before you accept.

Next in the workflow

What most makers open after this

These are not a list of everything. They are the tools this one hands off to, and they already know what you did here.

FreeProduct PricingPrice it so you actually get paid.FreeYour ProductsMeasure it once. Price it once. Every other tool reads from here.FreeSheet NesterFit more parts on less material, and see exactly what didn’t fit.

Worth reading

The thinking behind this one

The tool does the arithmetic. These cover the decision it is serving.

Members

Laser Production Planner is part of the Hub

Ten of the fourteen tools are free and stay free — everything that gets a file onto the machine correctly. The four generators and the planner are what turn a craft into a product line, and they come with the Hub.

Join the Maker Growth Hub