From 40-minute Excel quotes to two-minute offers. An AI-native pricing engine for an eco bag manufacturer, built on Open Mercato after a low-code tool hit its ceiling.
A custom quoting tool for an eco bag manufacturer, built for the people who write offers all day. Pricing here runs on more than 20 variables: order volume, print type, and the labor and production time of each garment part. The tool turns that complexity into a few clicks.
What it does
The product centers on an offers list and a quote builder. Staff search for a client, open their last order, duplicate it, adjust a few details, and send. The offers list carries clear status labels, so nobody loses track of what is open, sent, or won. A chat panel sits in the bottom corner: instead of clicking through screens, you ask the system to summarize the month or list the orders in production, and it answers.
Why it matters
For years the company quoted from Excel. Several versions of it, one per employee. A price changed, someone updated their copy, someone did not. Worse, the knowledge of how to price lived in the heads of a few long-tenured people, undocumented and at risk the day they leave. A single quote took around 40 minutes. Now it takes two to ten, often closer to one or two for repeat orders. The pricing logic lives in the system, not in a corridor conversation.
Built on Open Mercato
We had spent half a year building the first version in a low-code tool. It worked for the simplest orders, the 40% of volume that ate the most time. Then complex products hit the ceiling: too many variables, too much code, too much to maintain. Open Mercato started us at 80% done: auth, multi-tenancy, module APIs, the audit trail, and the AI agent surface. We spent the rest on the domain, the pricing algorithm and the offer workflow. The .ai folder was the surprise: instructions, boundaries, and architecture schemas that keep the AI from hallucinating, inventing packages, or overwriting files it should not touch. That protects the core, so we stay current with the open source releases instead of forking away from them.
Open source, full control, zero vendor lock-in.
