v1.0

Until v1.0, every print shop on MaxPax was one we had set up in person — visited, configured, watched the first few quotes go out before we left. From v1.0, a shop can sign up at the website, connect their inbox, and start quoting on their own. The release also brings a new name: until this week, MaxPax was called Quotation AI.

Self-serve sign-up

Three things take you from "I read about MaxPax" to "MaxPax is answering my quotes."

Connect your inbox. About three minutes. Either paste in IMAP and SMTP details from your email provider, or click through Google or Microsoft 365 to authorise the system. From this point on, MaxPax watches your incoming mail.

Upload your pricing sheet. About five minutes. Drop the .xlsx file you already keep, point at the cells the system needs as inputs (quantity, size, stock, finishing) and the cell that holds the price. The same workbook you tune by hand still tunes everything.

Configure your products. About ten minutes. Add a product (flyer, business card, brochure, whatever you sell), name its fields, mark which are required, save it. Repeat for every product type you quote. Most shops have between three and a dozen.

What this enables. A print shop owner who hears about MaxPax on a Wednesday afternoon can have it answering quotes by Wednesday evening. The first three days are on us. After that, the trial converts to a regular plan if you keep using it, or stops if you don't.

Per-quote billing

Most software charges per seat. Print shops don't really have seats — the shop has one inbox, one pricing sheet, one set of customers. Charging by the seat would be charging the wrong unit.

v1.0 charges by the quote instead. A flat monthly fee covers an included number of quotes that handles most shops; if you go over, each extra quote costs a small overage rate. A quiet month costs less than a busy one. The bill is itemised so you can see what you are paying for.

Filtered emails — spam, autoreplies, "thanks for the quote" messages — cost less than a real quote, because the system sorts them out before doing the expensive work.

What this enables. A predictable monthly cost that scales with how busy the shop is, not how many people sit at desks. The expensive months pay for themselves; the quiet ones don't punish you.

Quotation AI is now MaxPax

We called the project Quotation AI from the day we wrote the first line of code. It was a description, not a brand. As long as we were the only people who used it, that was fine. The day we opened sign-ups, it was not. Quotation AI sounds like a category. MaxPax is a name — short, easy to say down a phone line, memorable enough that a print shop owner can tell another print shop owner about us without looking it up.

The product, the team, and the system underneath are exactly what they were the week before. Only the letterhead changed.

Release testing

Before opening sign-ups we built an evaluation suite from real anonymised quote enquiries gathered over the previous six months. Every release runs against fifty hand-labeled cases and reports where the system reads right, where it reads wrong, and where it has changed since the last release. We didn't ship v1.0 until that suite passed. We have not shipped a release without it passing since.

What this enables for you. Quiet confidence that v1.1, v1.2, and every release after will not silently regress. The eval suite catches it before you do.

What comes next

v1.1 is the release where MaxPax learns to ask when it's unsure — the AI you can hand to a team without watching every quote it drafts. Sub-user permissions, confidence-based auto-review, an intent filter for spam, and a metrics dashboard so you can see how the system is doing. Coming in March.

If you run a print shop and would like to try MaxPax on real enquiries, sign up at maxpax.ai. First five quotes are on us — no card needed.