Kitting & Fulfillment Quote Widget
What a kitted box actually costs to assemble, before you quote it as "a few bucks each."
Kitting gets quoted by feel more than any other service in this industry. Someone says "three bucks a kit" because that sounds about right, and then a person spends nine hours assembling 200 boxes and nobody ever measures what that cost.
This breaks a kit into the four things that actually cost money: labor, packaging materials, project setup, and storage. Time one kit with a stopwatch, put the real number in, and the arithmetic will tell you whether your gut price was close.
Price the kit
Time one real kit with a stopwatch before you use this. The guess is always low.
The project
Used for the sanity check on your assembly time, not for the price.
Assembly labor
Assemble three kits, average them, then add a little for the ones that go wrong.
Packaging materials per kit
One-time and storage
Kit spec, first article, receiving and counting inbound product, address list cleanup.
Shipping and margin
$2,302.78 for the project, $921.11 gross profit
Labor, materials, setup, storage
30 seconds per item at your stated pace
Per-kit cost stack
Project fixed costs
If labor is under a third of your cost per kit, check your assembly time again. It is the number people guess and the number that decides whether a kitting program makes money.
Labor rate should be fully loaded (wage plus payroll burden), not the hourly wage. Setup and storage are spread across the kit count, which is why small kit projects cost more per unit than anyone expects.
How the math works
Labor
Assembly time per kit times your fully loaded labor rate. Fully loaded means wage plus payroll burden, not the hourly wage on the offer letter. If you have never timed a kit, assemble three and average them, then add a little for the ones that go wrong.
Materials
Box, filler, insert card, poly bags, tape, and shipping label. Individually trivial, collectively often more than the labor. This is the line most gut quotes miss entirely.
Project setup
One-time work: kit spec, first article, receiving and counting inbound product, and the address list cleanup nobody budgets for. Spread across the kit count, it is the reason 50-kit projects are not cheap.
Storage
Pallets times monthly rate times months held. If product sits for a quarter before it ships, that is real warehouse cost, and it belongs in the quote rather than in a surprise conversation later.
Shipping
Kept as its own line because it is usually quoted separately or passed through. Toggle it in to see the true landed cost per kit.
The production version
Kitting & Fulfillment Suite
Live in productionPrice kitting from a rate card instead of a guess.
Proof: Kitting quotes stopped being a negotiation with my own memory; the warehouse can bill what the floor actually holds.
Questions, answered
For simple three-to-five-item kits, labor commonly lands somewhere between one and four minutes per kit once a line is set up, plus materials. But the honest answer is that it depends on your labor rate, packaging, and how fiddly the kit is, which is why this calculator asks for your inputs instead of quoting an average.
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Want this running inside your systems?
A calculator is the demo. The version I run reads the order, applies the rates, and produces the client document without anyone opening a spreadsheet. The teardown is free and I will tell you plainly whether it is worth automating.