Quoting
Phase 01A machine-readable submission goes in: the build-tree BOM, its documents, your suppliers, a demand profile. The OS validates it, verifies every supplier through one standard protocol, and returns a costed BOM with a price and a confidence number. Computed, not negotiated; no sales cycle, no human in the loop. The submission carries the whole burden of being complete. That is the deal, and it is why the rest can be autonomous.
The autonomous loop
Single-part instant quoting is a solved industry problem. Autonomous quoting of a full assembled product is not. The only players who do anything close collapse the supply chain into their own parts catalogue. Moduloa's answer is different: the customer's own suppliers already hold every price, so the OS asks them, through one protocol, on the same terms, for everyone.
01 · The submission
One build-tree BOM, its documents, your suppliers as verifiable identities, a demand profile (how many, how often, growing or shrinking, or one-time), and what to optimize for, because a low-volume product tuned for cheap tooling and a high-volume product tuned for cycle time are different quotes. The full contract is published as the intake standard, with an interactive builder and downloadable templates. A submission that validates gets processed; one that does not gets a machine report saying exactly why. No human reads it, so nothing unknown can enter.
02 · Validation, then verification
Schema validation is instant: tree integrity, revision discipline, document hashes, registry-resolvable suppliers. Then the supplier confirmation protocol runs: the same five questions to every supplier named on every line, inside a fixed window; catalogue electronics confirm machine-to-machine through parts APIs without waiting for anyone's inbox. Silence is priced into the confidence number, never chased by phone.
03 · The costed BOM
Materials come from supplier attestations, line by line. Assembly and test effort come from the tier model, the same five inputs the public tier calculator runs today: batch size, recurrence, product stability, quality requirements, portability. The quote is both together, and it carries a confidence number that says how much of it is attested versus estimated. The industry's dirty secret is that quoted-versus-actual gaps come mostly from labor guessing, not component pricing. That is why the confidence number covers labor too, and why the tier model is published to be corrected.
04 · The price, and the choices
Three things return together. The costed BOM with its confidence. The optimization offers, tiered exactly like the thesis prices engineering: component swaps where your alternates policy already consented (easy), consolidation and part-level redesign proposals (medium), and deep rework for mass production (hard). Design-for-manufacturing is in scope precisely because it serves the production, and it is the one engineering service this model sells. And the factory options: the hub the economics point to, plus the alternatives with their transparent price deltas, so a 10% premium for your preferred location is a choice you make with open eyes. Accept, and the order binds to a tier and a quality contract, never to a factory. Industrialization takes it from there.
Run the tier mapping yourself: the production tier calculator encodes that half of the model, in the open. The intake half is the standard.
Capacity, not a factory relationship
This phase is where Layer 01 (capacity as infrastructure) meets the customer. What is quoted is not a slot on one specific line: it is capacity in a certified network, bound to a tier and a quality contract.
- Price negotiated case by case, over weeks
- Process knowledge lives inside the supplier's walls
- Capacity implicit in lead time
- Risk hidden; switching slow and expensive
- Priced by production tier, in minutes
- Process knowledge encoded in the blueprint and carried with the product
- Capacity reserved, measured, and visible
- Production moves when tariffs, energy, risk, or demand move
Capacity is secured ahead of need: a priced slot at a hub, not a hope inside someone's lead time.
Pricing follows the production tier and the capacity consumed: structured, not case-by-case bargaining.
Hub certification makes capability measurable, so two hubs can be honestly compared for the same blueprint.
At the higher tiers, a validated blueprint can be deployed at another certified hub when cost, risk, tariffs, or demand justify the move.
What has to be proven
Computed pricing is a claim, not yet a demonstration. The tier model is v0.1, a deliberately simple draft published to be corrected. The strict intake is the boldest bet of all: every study of quoting behavior says friction kills conversion, and this phase chooses maximal intake friction on purpose. The wager is that customers who clear the bar are worth more than the volume lost at it, and no incumbent can copy the move because their margin depends on humans absorbing ambiguity. Customers may resist portable production for critical products and prefer the devil they know, and tier-based pricing is commercially unproven. The claims are dated so they can fail in public: P-09 (customers pay a premium for manufacturing optionality), P-11 (customers buy production tiers, not just production), and P-15 (manufacturing capacity works like cloud capacity). See the register →