Custom 3D product configurators, built for how your product is made

These three terms get used interchangeably by people selling all three, and buyers regularly arrive asking for one while needing another. The distinctions are worth two minutes.

A configurator changes the structure of a product. Components, assemblies, options with rules between them: a swing bay that needs an outrigger, a coil that fits some units and only those. It is the right tool for build-to-order and engineer-to-order products, where what the customer assembles has to be something your factory can make.

A visualizer changes the surface of a fixed product. Colour, material, finish, monogram. The structure never varies, which makes visualizers simpler and cheaper, and for many consumer products a visualizer is all the product needs.

CPQ stands for configure, price, quote: sales software integrated with an ERP, built to keep quotes accurate and margins protected. We do not build or replace CPQ systems. We build the customer-facing experience in front of one and hand it configurations as structured data. If you are shopping for the CPQ itself, we are the wrong vendor, and knowing that now saves everyone a call.

A short test for which one you need: if a customer choice can change what the factory builds, you need a configurator. If every choice is cosmetic and the SKU count stays put, a visualizer will do it for less. If the pain lives in quoting accuracy rather than on the product page, the fix is probably inside your CPQ, and the right move is a configurator in front of it feeding it clean data.

Subscription configurator platforms are genuine products, and for a real class of products they are the right call. A fixed product with finish-level personalization, standard cart checkout, and no systems behind it to integrate is well served by a template platform at a subscription price, and if that is your product we will tell you so in the first conversation.

The platforms stop fitting where products stop being fixed. The published SaaS examples are sneakers, jewellery and sofas, and the pattern is no accident: template configurators handle surface choice well and structural choice poorly. An engineer-to-order product with exclusion rules, load constraints and a dealer quoting process has nowhere to put its logic in a colour-picker template.

Five conditions reliably break the template path. Engineer-to-order products, because the option logic is the product. Structural configuration, because template scenes assume fixed geometry with swappable materials. CPQ and ERP integration, because a configuration that cannot leave as structured data creates manual re-entry work downstream. Brand-critical visual fidelity, because a shared rendering pipeline looks like everyone else who rents it. And ownership, because a configurator that carries your catalogue, your rules and your pricing is an asset worth holding rather than a subscription that takes the asset with it when it lapses.

The economics deserve the same honesty in both directions. A $200 a month subscription beats a custom build for years on cash terms, and if a template covers your product, take that deal. It stops being a deal when the workarounds start: exports your ERP cannot read, rules maintained by hand in a spreadsheet beside the tool, a per-seat price that scales with your dealer network. Custom costs more on day one and less every month after the workarounds would have started.

You may also have read that custom means $200,000 and a year of work. Some enterprise builds cost that, and the comparison usually being quoted sets exactly that enterprise build against an entry subscription. Ours mostly do not: the ranges further down this page are the ones we quote from, and the middle of them sits inside a season, not a fiscal year.

The build starts in your catalogue, not in a 3D tool. We sit with the people who quote and the people who say no to quotes, and we write the rule set down until both groups agree it is the product. Most projects surface a handful of rules nobody had ever written anywhere, which is worth the workshop on its own.

Assets come next. Existing CAD is usually the starting point, and the work is optimization: decimating engineering geometry to web weight, baking materials, building the level-of-detail versions phones will get. Where no CAD exists we model from drawings and photography. The configurator itself then goes together in weekly builds you can click, because a configurator is exactly the kind of software that should be reviewed by using it.

Integration and launch close it out: the quote or cart handoff wired against your real systems in a staging environment, performance checked on mid-range phones, accessibility checked with a keyboard and a screen reader, and analytics live from the first day so the configurator starts reporting on itself.

Configurator work is vertical work: the rules, the buyers and the systems differ more between industries than the rendering does. These are the ones we build for.

The wider portfolio lives on the portfolio.

Agencies bring us manufacturing clients who need a configurator the agency cannot staff internally, and it is some of the best-defined work we take. We operate as a 3D configurator agency partner under your contract and your brand when that serves the client: we build the 3D, the rules and the integrations, you keep the relationship and the site around it. The 3D practice page covers the rest of what we can carry.

The engagement usually shapes itself one of two ways. Either we take the configurator as a defined workstream inside your project plan, with your PM running the schedule, or we scope it as a fixed deliverable with our own timeline that plugs into yours at the integration points. Both come with the same working agreement: your client hears your name, and the work is documented well enough that your team can maintain it after handoff if you want to.

We publish ranges for the same reason we publish a pricing calculator: the budget conversation goes better when both sides start from the same page, and a range you can read before the first call is worth more than a quote form.

Published rates across this category run roughly $4,000 to $9,000 for 2D configurators, $10,000 and up for basic 3D, $15,000 to $25,000 for mid-complexity builds, $30,000 and up for advanced ones, and $40,000 to $70,000 or more for full multi-product planners. Those are fair reference points, and ours sit inside them.

A visualizer on a fixed product starts around $8,000. A structural configurator with real rule logic typically runs $15,000 to $40,000, with the width set by how many rules your product carries and how the output needs to leave. Builds integrated with a CPQ or ERP start near $35,000, which is the same floor our published pricing puts under platform work generally. Multi-product planners are scoped individually.

Three things move the number more than anything else. The rule count, because encoding and testing constraint logic is most of the engineering. The state of your assets, because clean CAD that decimates well can save weeks against remodelling from photographs. And the integration depth, because a quote email costs little and a bidirectional ERP conversation is a project of its own. Every build includes the asset pipeline, the rules engine, analytics, and a documented handoff; none of it carries a licence fee from us.

Every number above is the opening of a scoping conversation, quoted the way the calculator quotes: from bases and modifiers we publish, at plus or minus ten percent.