On a Wednesday morning in early May, Lewis opens his laptop at the front bench of Print Station and finds 9 quotes already gone out overnight. Books for a primary school. A run of A4 sheets for an accountant. Brochures for a real-estate office in the next suburb. A flyer for a cafe owner who replied within the hour. None of them needed him. The press has been off since 6pm the previous evening. The shop was closed; the inbox was not.
Print Station has been printing in the south of Sydney since 1990. The shop sits on Durham Street in Hurstville, 35 years of work running under a single roof. It is a trade printer first, working for agencies, resellers, and businesses across the state, and it takes direct enquiries too. The catalogue runs from business cards to billboards: digital and offset and large format, plus the finishing work most shops would have to send out. Foiling, embossing, spot UV, thermography, edge foiling, letterpress. All in-house.
On their own website, Print Station tells customers two things to expect of them. A 24-hour turnaround on most jobs. And 90% of quotes back within minutes. The second of those is the one we are here to talk about.
Lewis runs the shop. Print Station is the first shop on MaxPax, signed up in February, and across the 3 months since, the system has progressively taken over more of the shop's quoting work.
The shape of the story
- →3 months on the system. Connected in February 2026; running on Print Station's working inbox the same week.
- →Quoting time more than halved. By Lewis's own count. The workbook is the same, the customers are the same, only the lookup is gone.
- →Most replies leave without review. Of every 10 quotes the system processes, 9 go out without a flag for his eye.
- →5 products, 1 inbox. Books, sheets, NCR, pads, raised print, all priced from the workbook he already keeps.
“MaxPax reduced our quoting time by over half — and our clients notice the difference. Faster responses mean happier clients, while our team can focus on what truly matters: production quality and outstanding service.”
Before
Before MaxPax, quoting at Print Station looked like every independent print shop's quoting looks. The enquiries arrive when they arrive: over coffee, between jobs on the press, at half past 9 on a Sunday night. The pricing sheet sits in a workbook on the office laptop. A reply takes 5 minutes if everything is to hand and longer if it is not. There is no good time to write them; there is only finding the time, and the time it takes is time that is not on the press.
On a busy week, 60 or 70 enquiries would land in the inbox: a steady drip from morning, a wave around lunchtime when agencies got back from briefings, a long tail through the afternoon and evening. The Friday-evening enquiries would sit unanswered until Monday. By Monday, the customer often had a reply from somewhere else.
“Our estimator spent most of the day on manual quoting — sometimes over 50 quotes in a single day. It had been an enormous and stressful task. Mistakes happen when the deadline is tight.”
Lewis · Print Station
Today
3 months in, the shape of a working week at Print Station has changed. The pressman is still on the press. The phone still rings. What is no longer happening is the inbox queue building up across the day, waiting for a window that does not come.
The volume keeps climbing. From a quieter March, April carried more than twice the load. The shop now runs at the order of 500 quotes a month through MaxPax, and the pace is still rising. Replies go out within a minute of an enquiry arriving, day or night. The customer reads the price before they have closed their email tab.
From email arrival to reply sent
The arithmetic is plain. A quote in the old way was about 10 minutes of Lewis's time: read the email, open the workbook, find the right cells, look up the price, draft a reply, send. A quote in MaxPax's way is none of his time at all. Across 3 months on the system, that has added up to weeks of working hours, given back. He has put them on the press.
Cumulative working time given back
≈ 170 hr
of working time, across 3 months
≈ A$6,800
in labour cost at A$40/hr
How Lewis has it set up
Lewis has wired 5 products into MaxPax, each pointing at a different sheet of the pricing workbook he already kept: Books, Sheets, NCR, Pads, and Raised print. Sheets covers the broad flat work the shop runs (flyers, brochures, business cards, letterheads, leaflets, scodix, spot UV, folders, die cut, stickers); Books handles bound work (saddle stitching, perfect bound EVA and PUR, wiro, spiral, book case bound). Across the 5, he has nominated 131 fields in his workbook, each tied to a specific cell. The workbook is the source of truth; MaxPax fills in the inputs.
The 5 products · what each covers
Take Books. Page sizes from A4 portrait to A6 landscape, with custom dimensions to the millimetre. 11 binding methods. Around 50 cover stock options, gsm by gsm, finish by finish. Front and back colour methods independently configurable from black-only to 5 colours, with a standing rule that black counts as one of the PMS colours when several are specified. Quantities, foils, lamination, cover-page treatments, holes, perforations: each one a field, each one a cell.
Lewis has also told MaxPax how to read his customers. The trade has its own shorthand and his customers use it. Each instruction below is attached to the field it belongs to, so MaxPax applies it only when reading that field. Verbatim from his configuration:
Books · field instructions, written by Lewis
- “If user uses ‘pp’, it means printed pages.”
- “Minimum page number is 8.”
- “For saddle stitching binding, the page number needs to be a number in multiple of 4. If user asks for saddle stitching, and the page number is not multiple of 4, round the page number upwards to the nearest number of multiple of 4.”
- “Other binding method, page number needs to be an even number. If an odd number is detected, use the next even number.”
And from his NCR configuration:
NCR · field instructions, written by Lewis
- “For triplicated books or pads, return ‘50’ if not specified.”
- “If user asks for fan apart, return ‘1’.”
- “If user asks multiple PMS colours include black, black is considered one of the PMS colours, for example, Black and 1 x PMS colour, this is 2 x PMS colours.”
- “Hole punching is same as hole drilling.”
Each product also has its own review rules, written at product level rather than against any one field: when MaxPax is to hold a quote rather than send it. Lewis writes them in the same plain register, one per line. From Sheets:
Sheets · review rules, written by Lewis
- “Flag for review if Quantity is over 100,000.”
- “Flag for review if product has more than 4 finishing options.”
- “Flag to review if other finishing options are not in the list.”
- “Flag to review if there is a previous quote in the email.”
- “Flag to review if user indicated the job has been quoted previously, or is a repeat job.”
“You can set human intervention at any stage, on any circumstance. It keeps you in control, not the AI.”
Lewis · Print Station
This is the part of MaxPax no off-the-shelf tool gets to. The pricing logic was already in his workbook. What lives here is the rest: the trade vocabulary, the rounding conventions, the things a Sydney print-shop owner notices on the third reading of an enquiry that a younger system would miss. He wrote it all down. The system reads it every time.
“We teach the printing experience to the AI. Unlike a human, it never forgets — never on holiday, never absent. It works 24/7.”
Lewis · Print Station
What changed
The first weeks were a hand-off. When a customer enquiry arrived in Lewis's inbox, he would forward it across to MaxPax, read the draft reply MaxPax wrote, and edit or approve it before any answer went back to the customer. He used the system as a second pair of eyes while he learned how it priced his work. As the drafts kept landing right, the routine changed. Lewis dropped the forwarding step and connected MaxPax to his customer-facing inbox directly, so the system could read enquiries and send replies on its own. Most quotes now leave without his hand on them at all.
The change shows up in two places at once. The first is on the volume chart below: from a quieter March, April carried more than twice the load, and May is on pace to surpass April. The second is harder to plot. It is the absence of the queue. The Friday-afternoon quotes are answered before the press is off. The Sunday-night quotes are answered Sunday night.
Monthly quote volume
* projected, 8 days in
Some of the lift is new business. Replies that go out within the minute land in the customer's inbox while the customer is still shopping the job around. The shop now wins quotes it would have lost on Monday morning to whichever competitor read the email first.
“Since we implemented the system, we've been getting more jobs — faster response than our competitors.”
Lewis · Print Station
Of every 10 enquiries the system processes for Print Station, 9 leave the outbox without being held for review. The 10th, an unfamiliar finishing option or a quantity outside the bands his workbook covers, sits in the queue for Lewis to glance at when he has a moment. The queue has never been longer than the time it takes to make a coffee.
The time he used to spend quoting, he now spends sharpening the system. He watches what gets flagged, tunes the rules, adds a finishing option to a dropdown, writes a fresh instruction when a customer's shorthand confuses MaxPax. Each adjustment lands in the next quote the system writes. The tool gets a little better every week, and the next hour of quoting work it saves him goes back into making the tool better still.
Print Station · February – May 2026
3 mo.
On MaxPax
> 50%
Quoting time saved
per Lewis
9 / 10
Sent without
being held for review
131
Pricing fields
configured
Next steps
Print Station is the first shop on MaxPax. Their site is at printstation.com.au.
If you run a print shop and the queue at the bottom of your inbox sounds familiar, the getting started guide walks through connecting your inbox and pointing MaxPax at the pricing workbook you already keep.
Pricing is light to start with. The first 5 quotes the system runs for you are free, no card required. If the replies read right, $1 buys 3 months on the system after that.