Machine Shop Software: Fixing Quoting, Setups, and Scheduling
Build when your shop is running more than roughly 12 to 20 machines across one or more buildings, quoting over 150 RFQs a month, and your estimator is the bottleneck.
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Build when your shop is running more than roughly 12 to 20 machines across one or more buildings, quoting over 150 RFQs a month, and your estimator is the bottleneck. A focused first release covering quoting, routing, and machine scheduling typically runs $60k to $130k and ships in 12 to 16 weeks in our delivery experience. A full platform tying quoting to shop floor data collection, tooling, inspection records, and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) financials runs $150k to $400k phased over 6 to 12 months. Below 8 machines with simple prismatic parts, stay on JobBOSS or ProShop and spend the money on a probe and a pallet system instead.
Why machine shop software makes or breaks a high-volume CNC operator
Your estimator has been quoting for 22 years. He opens the customer's STEP file in a viewer, eyeballs the part, remembers that the last 17-4 PH bracket like this one ran 14 minutes a side on the HAAS UMC-750 with the 40 taper, and types a number into a spreadsheet that has been forked six times since 2019. He is right about 80 percent of the time. The other 20 percent is where your margin lives. When he is wrong high, you lose the job to the shop across town. When he is wrong low, you eat 300 pieces of aluminum at 40 percent under cost and nobody finds out until the job closes three months later and the accountant flags it.
Meanwhile the schedule lives in three places that disagree with each other. There is the JobBOSS or E2 due date, which reflects a promise made to the customer. There is the whiteboard in the shop office, which reflects what the second shift lead actually plans to run. And there is the truth, which lives in the head of the guy who knows the 5-axis is down for a spindle rebuild until Thursday and that the Swiss cell is waiting on 12L14 bar stock that Fastenal short-shipped. Your dispatch list says Job 44182 starts Tuesday on machine 7. Machine 7 has a fixture for a different job bolted to the table and the setup guy has already cut the soft jaws.
Here is the scene that costs the most money and shows up in every shop we have worked in: a customer calls about a reorder of a part you ran 14 months ago. Nobody can find the setup sheet. The program is on the control, or maybe on a thumb drive in a toolbox, or maybe on the network share under a folder named by the operator who quit. The tool list exists as a photo somebody took on their phone. So you re-prove out a job you already proved out, burn 4 hours of a $95 an hour machine plus an $85 an hour setup tech, and quote the reorder at the same price as the first run because your system has no idea the second run should take 90 minutes instead of 5 hours. That is roughly $700 of pure waste per reorder, and the shops we work with at that size do 15 to 30 reorders a month.
Problem: quoting is a memory exercise, not a data exercise
The pain: in the shops we have opened the books on, quote hit rate sits between 18 and 30 percent, and nobody can tell which quotes they lose on price versus lead time, because nothing captures the outcome. Your estimator quotes 40 RFQs a week and touches each one for 25 to 60 minutes. That is a full-time job spent retyping information that already exists in the customer's PDF and STEP file.
Why the incumbents cannot fix it: JobBOSS2, E2 Shop System, and Global Shop Solutions all have a quoting module. Every one of them is a form. You type in material, you type in cycle time, you type in setup hours, and it does arithmetic. None of them look at the geometry. None of them know that your shop, specifically, runs 4140 pre-hard 30 percent slower than 6061 on the Mazaks but not on the Doosans. Paperless Parts and MachineMetrics are better in narrow slices, Paperless for quote packaging and MachineMetrics for spindle data, but neither closes the loop from geometry to your actual historical run time to a price.
What a custom build does differently: the quoting engine starts with the STEP or Parasolid file and runs feature recognition to extract hole counts, hole depth to diameter ratios, pocket volumes, thin walls, tightest tolerance callouts, and required setups. Then it queries your own job history, not a generic library, for parts with similar feature vectors, and returns the actual recorded cycle time from the machine, not the estimated one. This is where AI is worth the money: an extraction model reads the customer PDF drawing and pulls the tolerance callouts, material spec, finish spec, and quantity breaks into structured fields, so your estimator reviews rather than retypes. We have taken shops from 35 minutes per quote to 8 minutes per quote on repeat-family work. The engine also stores the quote outcome, won or lost and against what price, so within 6 months you have a hit-rate curve by customer, by part family, and by lead time, and you can stop quoting the customers who only use you as a stalking horse.
Problem: setups are tribal knowledge that walks out the door
The pain: you have a setup guy who has been there 19 years and a setup guy who has been there 8 months, and the difference in their setup times on the same part is 3 hours versus 55 minutes. When the 19-year guy retires, the shop loses a chunk of its capacity and nobody has a number for it.
Why the incumbents cannot fix it: ERP systems model a setup as a number of hours on a routing line. That is it. There is no object called a setup that has a fixture, a soft jaw program, a tool list with actual pocket assignments, a work offset, a probing routine, and a photo of the part clamped in the vise. Shops solve this with a network folder, a wiki nobody updates, or Excel. Then the folder path breaks when IT migrates to SharePoint.
What a custom build does differently: a setup becomes a first-class record tied to a part revision and a specific machine, not a number in a routing. It carries the NC program with its Git-style revision history, the tool list with pocket numbers and holder types, the fixture ID pulled from your fixture inventory with its physical rack location, the work offset values, the first-article dimensional results, and photos or short videos the setup tech captures on a tablet at the machine. When the same part number comes back 14 months later, the system knows it, surfaces the setup, tells you the fixture is in rack B slot 12, and the reorder gets quoted at 90 minutes of setup because that is what your own data says a repeat setup costs. Track this for a year and you have a real number for what tribal knowledge is worth, and a real onboarding path for the new tech.
Problem: the schedule is a fiction that nobody trusts
The pain: your ERP finite scheduler produces a Gantt chart. Your shop lead prints it, looks at it, and runs the whiteboard anyway. Every shop we have walked into with a scheduling module in the ERP has a whiteboard or a magnet board next to the machine that is the real plan. Ask why and the answer is always some version of: the scheduler does not know about tooling, does not know about the operator who can run the Swiss, and thinks all four VMCs are the same machine.
Why the incumbents cannot fix it: off-the-shelf finite capacity scheduling models a work center with a capacity number. Your reality is that machine 7 and machine 9 are both HAAS VF-4s but only machine 7 has the 4th axis and the through-spindle coolant, only two operators are cleared to run the Swiss cell, and the boring bar for the 2.375 bore exists in exactly one holder that is currently sitting in the Mazak. The constraint is not machine hours. The constraint is the intersection of machine capability, fixture availability, tooling availability, and operator certification. No packaged scheduler models all four because the data model does not have places to put them.
What a custom build does differently: the scheduler solves against your actual constraint set. Machines carry capability tags (4th axis, live tooling, bar feeder, max Z, spindle taper). Jobs carry capability requirements derived from the setup record. Fixtures and critical tooling are modeled as finite resources that can only be in one place. Operators carry certifications with expiry. The solver runs against all of it and produces a dispatch list per machine that the shop lead will actually follow, because it accounts for the things he was overriding it for. Machine state comes in live via MTConnect or FOCAS from the controls, so when the spindle goes down at 2 am the schedule reflows before first shift walks in instead of after. AI earns its keep on the forecasting side here: a model trained on your own cycle time variance predicts which jobs are likely to run long based on material, feature complexity, and which operator is on the machine, and you buffer those specifically instead of padding everything by 15 percent.
Problem: you find out you lost money on a job three months late
The pain: job costing in every off-the-shelf shop ERP is retrospective accounting. The job closes, someone posts labor and material, and a variance report appears. By then you have quoted the reorder at the same wrong price and taken three more jobs from the same customer at the same wrong margin.
Why the incumbents cannot fix it: the labor data is garbage in, and everyone knows it. Operators clock into jobs on a terminal at shift start and clock out at shift end. If a guy runs three jobs across two machines during a shift, the time gets attributed however he remembers it at 3:15 pm. The ERP faithfully computes wrong numbers from wrong inputs.
What a custom build does differently: stop asking humans to report time. Pull machine state directly from the control (MTConnect on the Haas and Mazak, FOCAS on the Fanuc, direct on the Okuma) and attribute spindle-on time to the job the operator confirmed on a tablet at setup. Cycle counts come from the machine, not from a tally sheet. Now you get a live margin number per job that updates every cycle, and a variance alert that fires at 40 percent through the run, not at close. In our delivery experience the first month of accurate data almost always reveals two or three part families the shop has been losing money on for years while believing they were the bread and butter. That single finding usually covers a meaningful share of the build cost.
Problem: quality and traceability records are a separate universe
The pain: you are AS9100 or ISO 9001 registered, or you want to be, and your quality records live in a folder tree plus a stack of paper FAIR packets plus an inspector's Excel workbook. An audit finding, or worse, a customer escape, means someone spends two days reconstructing what happened on a job from March.
Why the incumbents cannot fix it: the ERP owns the job and the quality software owns the inspection, and they talk to each other through a spreadsheet export at best. AS9102 first article reports get built by hand. The material cert for the heat lot lives as a PDF in an email thread.
What a custom build does differently: the traceability chain is one object graph. Heat lot number attaches to the raw material receipt with the mill cert PDF, flows to the job, flows to the piece, flows to the inspection record and the shipping document. CMM output from your Zeiss or Mitutoyo lands in the system by file drop and maps to the balloon numbers on the drawing, which the extraction model has already parsed. First article reports generate rather than get typed. When a customer calls about a suspect part, you pull the full chain in 30 seconds instead of 2 days. If you run ITAR-controlled work, this also means the data can live where it has to live: US-hosted, access-controlled by role, with an audit log that shows who opened which drawing and when. That requirement alone disqualifies several of the cloud shop ERPs.
What this actually costs and how long it takes
Across 2,000-plus projects, this is where the money lands for shop software specifically. A focused first release runs $60k to $130k and ships in 12 to 16 weeks. Focused means one thing done properly: usually the quoting engine with geometry extraction and history matching, or the constraint-aware scheduler with live machine data, not both. A full platform covering quoting, routing, setup records, scheduling, machine data collection, quality, and ERP integration runs $150k to $400k phased over 6 to 12 months.
What pushes the number up in this category, in rough order of impact. First, machine connectivity: if your fleet is a mix of 2004 Fanuc controls, newer Haas NGC, Okuma OSP, and a couple of Swiss machines with proprietary interfaces, the integration layer alone is 4 to 6 weeks of work and may need an edge box per cell. A modern all-MTConnect fleet is 2 weeks. Second, CAM integration: reading tool lists and setup sheets out of Mastercam or Esprit or Fusion is doable but each one is its own effort. Third, the ERP boundary: if you are keeping JobBOSS or Global Shop for AR, AP, and GL and building on top, the sync layer is real work and needs a clear ownership rule for every field. Fourth, AS9100 and ITAR: the compliance surface adds hosting constraints, audit logging, and validation work worth 15 to 25 percent on top. Fifth, multi-site: two buildings that share work is a different data model than one building, and you find this out late if nobody says it early.
What keeps the number down: a clean scope on release one, a named person at the shop who can make decisions in an afternoon, and a willingness to run the new system alongside the old one for a cycle instead of demanding a hard cutover.
Build versus buy: take the position
Buy off the shelf if you run under about 8 machines, your work is mostly prismatic parts in aluminum and mild steel, your job mix repeats, and your estimator is not the bottleneck. ProShop ERP is a strong product and it is properly AS9100-aware, so if it fits, use it. JobBOSS2 and E2 are fine at what they do. Paperless Parts is worth its subscription if quoting throughput is your only problem and you are willing to live inside its model. Buying is the right call more often than vendors like us admit, and a subscription that fits beats a $200k build that fits slightly better.
Build when three or more of these are true. Your estimator is the constraint on revenue and you cannot hire another one who is any good. You are running 12-plus machines with meaningfully different capabilities and the packaged scheduler is being overridden every day. You have a specific process that is your competitive advantage, high-mix low-volume in exotics, or lights-out on pallet pools, or a proving-out method nobody else has, and the software forces you to work like a generic shop. Your reorder rate is above 40 percent and you are re-proving jobs you already ran. Or you have two or more buildings and the ERP treats them as one site or two disconnected sites, with no way to model the reality of shared work.
The honest tell: if you are paying three people to keep spreadsheets in sync with your ERP, you are already building software. You are just building it badly, in Excel, with no version control, and paying $180k a year in salary to maintain it.
How to choose a developer for machine shop software
Ask them to explain, without prompting, why setup time and run time need separate data models and what happens to a repeat order if you conflate them. If they cannot, they have not built this. The follow-up: ask how they would model a fixture that can only be in one place at a time. The right answer is a finite resource in the scheduler, not a text field on the routing.
Ask what they have connected to. You want specific control names and protocols out of their mouth: MTConnect agents, Fanuc FOCAS, Okuma THINC, Heidenhain. Ask what they do about a 2004 control with no network port, because you probably have one. A team that has done this will tell you about edge gateways and shrug. A team that has not will say the machine needs to be replaced.
Ask who owns the code and the data, and get the answer in the contract. You should own the repository, the schema, and every byte of your job history, and you should be able to hire a different team next year without a migration project. Any developer who hedges on this is building themselves an annuity out of your operation.
If you are AS9100 or ITAR, ask about hosting jurisdiction, role-based access on drawings, and audit log retention in the first conversation, not the fifth. A developer who has been through an aerospace customer audit will bring it up before you do. One who has not will treat it as a checkbox to add later, and later is where AS9100 projects go to die.
When you are ready to turn this into a specification, Digital Heroes writes a product requirements document before any code exists, so the scope is fixed and priced rather than discovered later at a day rate. You can take that specification to any other firm on your shortlist.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- Large companies globally have captured, on average, only 31% of the expected revenue lift and 25% of the expected cost savings from their digital and AI transformations - a significant gap between expected and realized value. Source: McKinsey & Company (2023) →
- SaaS spend averaged $4,830 per employee (up 21.9% year over year), with large enterprises (10,000+ employees) spending roughly $284M annually and running about 660 apps, while organizations wasted an average of $21M annually on unused licenses. Source: Zylo (2025) →
- SMS reminders that stated the specific cost of the appointment to the health system reduced missed appointments in Trial One, with the DNA (did-not-attend) rate falling from 11.1% (control) to 8.4% (specific-costs message) - an odds ratio of 0.74 (95% CI 0.61-0.89), i.e. roughly a 24-26% relative reduction - at no additional cost. (Trial Two replicated this at an 8.2% DNA rate.). Source: PLOS ONE (Hallsworth et al.) (2015) →
- 88% of customers say good customer service makes them more likely to purchase from a brand again in the future, quantifying the direct revenue link between support quality and retention. Source: HubSpot (2024) →
Frequently asked questions
How much does custom machine shop software cost for a 20 machine shop?
A focused first release, typically the quoting engine or the scheduler but not both, runs $60k to $130k and ships in 12 to 16 weeks. A full platform covering quoting, setups, scheduling, machine data collection, and quality runs $150k to $400k phased over 6 to 12 months. For a 20 machine shop the biggest cost driver is usually machine connectivity: a mixed fleet of older Fanuc, Haas, Okuma, and Swiss controls adds 4 to 6 weeks of integration work over an all-MTConnect fleet.
Is custom software better than JobBOSS or E2 for a CNC shop?
Not automatically. JobBOSS2 and E2 are competent at quoting arithmetic, work orders, and job costing, and if you run under 8 machines with repeating prismatic work they are the cheaper right answer. Custom wins when your constraint is something their data model cannot hold: fixture availability, operator certification, machine-specific capability, or geometry-driven quoting from your own run history. The tell is whether your shop lead overrides the ERP schedule every single day.
Can we keep our existing ERP and only build the quoting and scheduling parts?
Yes, and this is the most common shape we build. You keep JobBOSS, E2, or Global Shop for AR, AP, GL, and inventory, and build the quoting engine and scheduler on top with a sync layer. The critical decision is a clear ownership rule for every shared field: which system is the source of truth for the due date, the routing, and the part master. Get that wrong and you have two systems arguing, which is worse than one bad system.
How long does it take to migrate our job history and part data into a new system?
Plan 3 to 5 weeks inside the overall build, running in parallel rather than blocking it. Part masters, customers, and open jobs migrate cleanly. Historical routings and cycle times need review because the recorded times in most shop ERPs are estimator guesses rather than measured data, so we usually import them flagged as low confidence and let real machine data overwrite them over the first few months. Setup sheets and NC programs on network shares and thumb drives are the messiest part and worth budgeting real time for.
Who owns the code if we pay for a custom shop management system?
You should own the repository, the database schema, and all of your job history outright, with it written into the contract before work starts. That means you can hire a different team next year and hand them the codebase with no migration project. Any developer who is vague about code ownership is building a subscription out of your shop's operational data.
Does custom software work for AS9100 and ITAR compliance?
Yes, and it is often the reason shops build rather than buy, because several cloud shop ERPs cannot meet ITAR hosting requirements at all. A custom build lets you control hosting jurisdiction, enforce role-based access on controlled drawings, keep an audit log of who opened what, and generate AS9102 first article reports from the traceability chain instead of typing them. Budget 15 to 25 percent on top of the base build for the compliance surface.
Can AI actually quote CNC parts accurately or is it hype?
AI does two things well here and one thing badly. It reliably extracts tolerance callouts, material spec, finish spec, and quantity breaks out of customer PDF drawings, which cuts estimator time per quote substantially. It also matches new geometry against your own historical parts to surface real recorded cycle times. What it cannot do is invent a price for a part family you have never run, so the value scales with how much clean history you have.
How do we connect older CNC machines that have no network connection?
An edge gateway per machine or per cell handles it. Machines with Fanuc controls usually support FOCAS over an add-in ethernet card, and truly isolated older controls can be instrumented with a current sensor on the spindle to at least capture cycle and idle state. This is normal work, not a reason to replace a machine, and any developer who tells you the machine needs replacing has not done this before.
What is the fastest thing we can build that pays for itself?
Machine data collection plus live job costing, typically 8 to 10 weeks at the lower end of the band. It requires no behavior change from operators beyond confirming a job at setup, and the first month of accurate spindle-time data almost always reveals two or three part families the shop has been quietly losing money on. Fixing those prices usually covers a meaningful share of the build before the scheduler is even started.
How much does a custom ERP cost for a small business?
A small-business ERP covering two or three core modules typically runs $40,000 to $120,000, with inventory, ordering, and accounting sync being the usual starting set. Across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects, integration count and user roles drive cost far more than screen count. A full mid-market ERP with six or more modules usually lands between $150,000 and $400,000.
How long does it take to build a custom web or mobile app from scratch?
Plan on 8 to 16 weeks for a focused first version and 4 to 9 months for a larger platform, which is the typical spread across Digital Heroes builds. The first 2 to 3 weeks go to discovery and design before any production code ships. The two things that stretch timelines most are integrations with legacy systems and slow feedback from your side, not developer speed.
Will an app built for 10 users survive growing to 500?
Yes, if it is built on standard cloud infrastructure with a sound data model, because moving from 10 to 500 users is a hosting configuration change, not a rebuild. The scaling decisions that actually hurt are made early and invisibly: how the database is structured, how accounts and permissions are modeled, and whether background work is queued properly. Ask your agency how the system would handle ten times the load; the right answer is boring and specific, and a promise to cross that bridge later means you will pay for the bridge twice.
What does it cost to maintain a custom ERP each year?
Budget 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost per year, so a $150,000 ERP needs roughly $22,000 to $30,000 annually for hosting, security patches, integration upkeep, and small improvements. Across Digital Heroes maintenance contracts, third-party APIs changing is the biggest recurring work item. That total still usually sits well under the license bill for a comparable NetSuite or Dynamics seat count.
Should I pick Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central or build a custom ERP?
Pick Business Central if you already live in the Microsoft stack, your processes are close to standard, and around $80 per user per month for Business Central Essentials stays affordable at your headcount. Build custom when your revenue-driving workflow, such as custom manufacturing steps or unusual pricing logic, would need heavy extension work anyway. In our experience, once Dynamics customization quotes pass about $100,000 the custom option deserves a serious side-by-side.
How much should a small business budget for its first custom app or website?
For a focused first build, most small businesses land between $8,000 and $60,000: roughly $8,000 to $45,000 for a custom website and $25,000 to $60,000 for an internal tool or simple web app, based on Digital Heroes delivery across 2,000+ projects. Customer-facing products with payments, logins, or a mobile app start around $40,000. Quotes far below these bands usually mean a template with your logo on it, not software shaped around your workflow.
Will a custom ERP scale as we grow from 50 to 500 employees?
Yes, if it is designed for that from the start, which mostly means clean database design, permissions that handle new departments, and modules that stay separable. Adding users to software you own costs nothing in licenses, the opposite of the per-seat scaling penalty on NetSuite or Dynamics. What does need budget as you grow is new modules and integrations, so keep a small standing development arrangement rather than restarting a vendor search every two years.
Why do agencies charge for a discovery phase instead of quoting for free?
Because an accurate quote requires real work: mapping your workflows, finding the edge cases, and writing a specification, which typically takes 1 to 3 weeks and costs $2,000 to $10,000 at Digital Heroes depending on system complexity. You leave discovery owning a written spec and a fixed price you can take to any vendor, so the money is not locked into one agency. Free estimates are guesses, and the guess usually becomes your budget overrun six months later.
What should I prepare before contacting an ERP development agency?
Bring a list of your current tools and spreadsheets, a rough map of how an order or job moves through the company today, your user count by role, and the three problems costing you the most hours. You do not need a formal specification; a good agency writes that with you during discovery. Companies that arrive with those four things typically cut two to three weeks off scoping in our experience.
Can custom software connect to the tools we already use, like QuickBooks, Stripe, and Google Workspace?
Yes, and connecting your existing tools is one of the main reasons to build custom: mainstream platforms like QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, and Google Workspace all publish documented APIs. Budget 1 to 3 weeks of work per integration depending on API quality and how much data flows in both directions. Ask any vendor whether they have integrated with your specific tools before, because quirks like QuickBooks' OAuth token handling and API rate limits get learned on someone's project, and it should not be yours.
Who can build a custom ERP software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom ERP software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other ERP software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
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