not having an automated/instant quote system totally kills my interest in this; compare with ponoko or big blue saw, upload a design and it will very easily give exact prices for your design on various materials.
You mean their own design software? You are mistaken. Ponoko provides templates of their default material sizes, and that's about all that's required. Oh, you also need to use the correct color path to indicate between engrave and cut passes.
Either way, clearly you're already calculating this value for billing, no? Or are you just using laser run-time for the bill, and estimating that based on the user's guesstimated path length?
