It is half past four on a Friday in a Sydney print shop. The owner is on the press, hands black with ink, a forty-thousand-flyer run pulling through. Three quote enquiries from Wednesday sit in the inbox — an event organiser, a real-estate agency, a cafe owner who has now asked twice. The press has another two hours; after that, his daughter has a dance recital. He will not get to the quotes tonight. By Monday morning, one of the three customers will already have gone to the shop down the road.
This is the work Quotation AI was built to take off his desk.
A print shop's quoting workflow is one human, one inbox, one spreadsheet. Quotation AI is the software that runs it in your stead.
In v0.1
- →Inbox monitoring. Works with Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365, any email provider.
- →Spec extraction. Reads quantity, size, stock, sides, finishing from each email.
- →Excel-backed pricing. Reads the price from the cell you nominate in your existing sheet.
- →Draft replies. Drafts the reply in your voice; lands in your outbox for approval.
Before v0.1
The first version of Quotation AI ran inside Gmail as a Chrome extension. Click a button in the toolbar, watch the extension read the open thread, look up the price, draft a reply in the same compose pane. We built it through April. It worked.
It worked, and it was wrong. Half the print shops we showed it to were on Outlook; a third on Microsoft 365; a handful on plain IMAP through providers we'd had to be told the names of. A Chrome extension hooked into Gmail was not a system for the print trade — it was a system for one slice of it. We had spent five months on a foundation that solved the wrong problem.
v0 Apr–Sep 2025
v0.1 October 2025
In early October we ripped the Chrome extension out and rebuilt the email side of the pipeline on plain IMAP and SMTP. The commit message that day reads, in full: remove the gmail shit. It was an honest description of the work.
What follows is the system that came out of that rewrite.
How it works
You connect your inbox over IMAP and SMTP — Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, any provider that speaks the standard protocols. You upload the Excel pricing sheet you already keep, mark the cells that are inputs, and mark the cell that is the price. The pipeline does the rest.
An enquiry arrives at half past nine on a Tuesday morning:
Hey, chasing a quote on 2,000 A5 flyers, double sided, full colour on 150gsm gloss. Need them in hand by Saturday morning if possible. Cheers, Tom.
What follows runs in about a minute, end to end:
Tom's email arrives in your inbox.
Classified as a quote enquiry — not a reply, not a generic question.
A language model reads the body and pulls out the spec.
Inputs written into your sheet; price read back from cell C10.
Reply drafted in your voice and stored as a draft in your outbox.
You read it. You send it. To Tom.
By the time Tom opens the reply, he has not yet checked another shop's pricing.
Inbox-native, not a separate app
The simplest version of this product would be a web application: paste the email in, read the price out. We have deliberately not built it. We watched a shop owner try the prototype that worked that way, in June. He copied the email body, switched tabs to the calculator, pasted, copied the price, switched back, pasted into the reply, sent. Each step took longer than reading the email and opening his own pricing sheet would have. The tool she eventually wanted lived inside the inbox, not outside it. Quoting is an activity of the inbox; the system must live there.
Pricing from your Excel sheet
Print shops have spent years tuning their pricing logic in Excel. A shop we worked with through the summer keeps a workbook with separate tabs for business cards, flyers, posters, brochures, booklets, and a half-dozen finishing options unique to their press. Inside it: quantity breaks tuned across seven price points, finishing surcharges per stock, customer-tier discounts going back to a relationship from 2014. Every line of it is a formula that already works. To ask that shop to rebuild it in our user interface is to ask the shop to switch quoting systems; switching quoting systems is a project no one has time for. Quotation AI does not ask. It reads the sheet you already keep.
your-pricing.xlsx · the cells Quotation AI reads and writes
Drafts, not auto-sends
The model gets things wrong. Most of the time it gets things right. A handful of percent of the time it does not — and a handful of percent at thousands of quotes a year is dozens of customers receiving prices that could cost the shop money or the customer trust. "A few hundred A5-ish flyers, on something decent" is not a corner case in this trade; it is a Tuesday morning. v0.1 sends nothing to your customer without your approval. Drafts land in your outbox; you read them; you press send. Auto-send is a thing we intend to earn over time, not a default we will start with.
Any email provider
Half the shops we have spoken with are on Outlook. A third are on Microsoft 365. The rest are on plain IMAP, through providers we had not heard of before this work began — one through their web hosting company, one through a self-hosted server the owner's nephew set up in 2018 and has not touched since. A system that requires Gmail is not a system for the print trade; it is a system for one slice of it. v0.1 works with any email provider that speaks the standard protocols — which is to say: every inbox a print shop is likely to keep.
What comes next
The next release will move product configuration into a proper web UI, store every processed quote in a database with the extraction reasoning attached, and tighten the model on the failure cases we have gathered through the last six months. After that, we expect to open Quotation AI to print shops beyond the design partners we already work with, by direct sign-up.
Quotation AI is built for print shops, by close attention to print shops. If you run one and would like to try v0.1 on real enquiries, write to us.