Pricing a Design
The 3D Kitchen Designer prices every cabinet the moment you draw it — with no catalog product required. This page explains how that "catalog-free" pricing works, how to pick the materials that turn a $0 room into a real quote, how to read the price breakdown in the Quote & share panel, and how your one-time Designer settings drive the number.
Availability: Build plan and up. The Designer is badged Beta and also needs the per-role designer-page permission. If you're on Free or Commerce, you'll see an "Upgrade to Build" screen instead of the tool.
Catalog-free pricing, in plain terms
Most of TimberCloud prices from your catalog — you build a product, give it a formula, and orders draw on it. The Designer is different. Every cabinet you place is priced out of the box from standard cabinet construction applied to whatever materials you assign. You don't have to build a "Base Cabinet 24" product first; the Designer already knows how a base cabinet is made and how much material it takes.
That means:
- A base cabinet, a wall cabinet, a vanity — each one figures its own material take-off (the square feet of sheet goods, the board feet of face-frame lumber, the drawer boxes) from its size and construction.
- Multiply that take-off by the rate of the material you assigned, wrap it in your labor and margin, and you have a price — instantly, with no catalog entry.
Note: A brand-new room shows $0 until you assign a material. That's not a bug — the cabinet knows its take-off, but until it knows what it's made of it has no rate to multiply by. Assigning a material is the one step that turns the whole room into a real number.
Binding a product is an optional override
You can connect your own catalog products to the Designer (see Set up your catalog & designer settings). When you bind one of your products to a role — say your real "Shaker Maple Door" product to the Door role — that product's price and construction override the standard math for those parts. Everything you didn't bind keeps pricing catalog-free.
So there are two ways to get a price, and you can mix them on the same job:
| Approach | What prices the parts | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog-free (default) | Standard construction × your assigned material's rate, through your Rate Formula | You want a fast, accurate quote without maintaining cabinet products |
| Product-backed (override) | Your bound catalog product's own price and construction | You already price a door/box/carcass precisely and want the Designer to use it exactly |
Assign materials to price the room
Materials are assigned per role — the structural parts of a cabinet each get their own material so a maple carcass can carry walnut doors:
| Role | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Carcass | The box: sides, top/bottom, back, shelves |
| Face frame | The stiles and rails on the front (skipped entirely on frameless jobs) |
| Doors | Door fronts |
| Drawer fronts | The visible drawer faces |
| Drawer boxes | The pull-out boxes behind the fronts |
You'll find the same whole-job materials picker in two places, both pointed at the same values:
- In the editor's Construction section (left Editor panel), and
- Inside the Quote & share panel.
Pick a material in either spot and the whole room re-prices automatically — there's no "recalculate" button. Every cabinet inherits the room-wide choice unless you override an individual box in its Inspector.
Tip: Need a walnut island in a maple kitchen? Set the room default to Maple, then select just the island cabinets and change their Carcass/Door materials in the per-cabinet Inspector. The rest of the room stays maple.
Note: The materials picker only appears once your shop has built a material library. Until then there's nothing to choose from and the room can't price. An admin sets this up under Settings → Designer → Materials — see Designer settings.
The price breakdown
Open the Quote & share panel (the button in the designer’s top bar) in the top bar. It's the command center for a design: the total, the full price breakdown, the materials picker, and every deliverable.
The pricing side gives you three linked views:
The total and per-cabinet breakdown
The headline is the room total. Under it, the price breaks down run-by-run (each wall) and per cabinet so you can see exactly where the money is. Staff who have the View Prices permission see full amounts; staff without it see the numbers masked in both normal and Showroom mode (more on that below).
The Runs table
A Runs table shows, for every wall run:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Run | The run's label |
| Face | The length of the wall face the run is anchored to |
| Avail. | What's left of that face after openings and corners |
| Used | How much of it your cabinets consumed |
| Left | The leftover wall (shown in red if you've overrun the space) |
This is how you catch a run that's 40" short of full or a wall you've accidentally over-packed.
Fronts coverage
A Fronts read-out tells you how many cabinets got a real face program (doors/drawer fronts resolved) versus how many are still bare — e.g. "18/20 bound." If this ratio is low, some cabinets aren't yet pricing their fronts, which usually means a material or program is missing.
Showroom mode
Inside the price panel is a Showroom mode toggle for presenting a design to a customer in the room with you.
- It switches the price panel to customer-facing wording — it hides your shop's per-role build composition (the material-by-material breakdown) and softens the discount/margin wording.
- It paints an unmissable jade ribbon across the canvas so staff always know it's on.
Important: Showroom mode is a presentation switch, not a permission. It changes wording and hides the build composition, but it does not grant price visibility. The separate View Prices permission still governs who can see numbers at all — a staffer without View Prices sees masked amounts whether Showroom is on or off. Don't rely on Showroom mode to keep numbers from someone; use the permission.
How your settings drive the number
Catalog-free pricing is only as good as the one-time setup an admin does under Settings → Designer. Four things feed every price:
| Setting | What it controls | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Materials | The sheet/lumber materials and their per-unit rates (sq ft, bd ft, lin ft, sheet) that the take-off multiplies by | Settings → Designer → Materials |
| Labor | A library of labor rates (each, per hour, per cabinet, per linear/square/board foot, per job) that become additive cost lines | Settings → Designer → Labor |
| Rate Formula | The single shop formula: material take-off × material rate, plus any labor/overhead/finishing lines, all wrapped by a job margin | Settings → Designer → Rate Formula |
| Job Defaults | Whether new rooms start with doors/fronts and drawer boxes included | Settings → Designer → Defaults |
Important: Until your shop authors a Rate Formula, catalog-free rows refuse to price — the Designer shows them as un-priced rather than silently quoting $0. This is deliberate: a silent zero on a customer quote is far more dangerous than an obvious "not priced yet." A Rate Formula plus at least one material are the two prerequisites for any catalog-free price. See Designer settings to author them.
The job margin lives inside the Rate Formula as a literal percentage — it wraps the whole job, so raising it lifts every catalog-free cabinet at once.
Why a cabinet might not price
If a cabinet shows as un-priced or the room stays at $0, walk this checklist:
- No material assigned — pick one in Construction or the Quote & share panel.
- No Rate Formula authored — an admin must set one under Settings → Designer.
- Empty material library — nothing to assign; build materials first.
- A bound product that resolves to $0 — if you've overridden a role with a catalog product whose own price computes to zero, that override wins and quotes zero. The catalog wizard's mapping-health report flags exactly these; see Set up your catalog & designer settings.
- Fronts turned off — the Contents toggles can exclude doors/fronts or drawer boxes on purpose (for a customer-supplied-doors job). That removes them from the drawing, cut list and price together, and the Contents section turns amber to warn you.
Next Steps
- Quotes, cut lists, CAM & exports — turn the priced design into shop and customer documents
- From design to order — commit the design into a real order or emailed quote
- Set up your catalog & designer settings — the one-time setup that makes pricing accurate
- Designer settings — Materials, Labor, Rate Formula and Job Defaults in detail
- Share a 3D design with your customer — send a no-login link to a homeowner