Laser Cutting Cost Calculator

Copper and brass conduct heat exceptionally well, which means the heat the laser generates at the cut point disperses into the surrounding material faster than it does in steel, making it harder for the laser to maintain a clean, efficient cut. This calculator reflects that with a lower baseline cutting speed for copper/brass than for mild steel, stainless, or aluminum, which directly increases machine time and therefore machine cost per part.

Setup time — loading the cutting program, positioning the material, and inspecting the first piece — is a fixed cost regardless of how many parts you're running, and this calculator spreads that fixed cost evenly across the whole batch. A small batch absorbs that setup overhead in just a few parts, driving up cost per part, while a large batch dilutes the same fixed setup cost down to a nearly negligible amount per unit.

Machine cost depends on how long the laser actually spends cutting — driven by cut path length, material thickness, and material type — while material cost depends purely on how much raw material the finished part physically consumes, priced by weight. These are genuinely independent physical quantities: a part with a long, intricate cut path but very little material (a fine lattice pattern) can have high machine cost and low material cost, while a large solid blank with a short cut perimeter inverts that relationship entirely.

Cut time scales directly (linearly) with cut path length, so nesting parts to share cut lines with neighboring parts, or simplifying a design to reduce unnecessary internal cuts, translates into a proportional reduction in machine time and therefore machine cost. This is why efficient nesting layouts that let adjacent parts share a common edge cut are a standard cost-reduction technique in sheet-metal fabrication.