Laser cutting services for custom metal parts and tube laser cutting

There is no single laser cutting thickness limit, and the published spread is 16x

Ask how thick a laser can cut and you will get a confident number from whichever page you happened to open. Put the pages next to each other and the confidence disappears. In September 2026, reading each vendor's own capability page: Protolabs publishes 0.024 in to 0.250 in. Fabworks publishes mild steel up to 0.500 in, stainless up to 0.375 in, and aluminum up to 0.250 in. SendCutSend publishes 0.015 in to 0.750 in. OSH Cut publishes 0.005 in to 1 in on sheet and plate. Xometry states its laser service can cut through up to 4 inches of metal.

That is a sixteenfold range between the lowest and highest published ceiling, from six independent companies describing the same process. It is the single most useful thing to know before you plan a part, because almost every buyer forms their expectation from one page and then treats it as the law of the category.

Two things explain the spread, and neither is stated where a buyer would find it. The first is that the ceiling is per material, not per machine. Fabworks is the only one of the six to publish this plainly, and its numbers make the point on their own: one fiber laser, 0.500 in in mild steel but only 0.250 in in aluminum, exactly half. Aluminum is reflective and conducts heat out of the cut faster than steel does, so it caps lower on identical equipment. The practical consequence is that the question can you cut three eighths of an inch has no answer until you name the alloy. In mild steel most of these vendors will; in aluminum most will not.

The second is business model. A platform that owns its machines publishes the capability of those machines. A platform that routes work across a network of partner shops publishes the capability of the network, which is why Xometry's 4 in figure sits so far above the rest. Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions, and only one of them tells you what will happen when you press quote.

The quarter inch ceiling people repeat is a bending limit, not a cutting limit

The 0.250 in figure has become the folk number of online sheet metal, and it is quoted far outside the context it came from. It is a real limit, but it belongs to fabrication, meaning cutting and forming together, and not to cutting on its own.

OSH Cut publishes both numbers where you can compare them: laser cutting on sheet and plate from 0.005 in up to 1 in, and bending up to 0.750 in. Same shop, same order, and the forming ceiling sits a quarter inch below the cutting ceiling. Protolabs shows the same shape from the other direction, publishing its 0.024 in to 0.250 in window as part of a sheet metal fabrication service that includes press brake work, not as a laser specification.

So the honest rule is this: if your part is flat, with no bends, your available ceiling is two to four times higher than the number most buyers quote themselves, and several of these vendors will cut it today. Add a single bend and you drop back toward the forming limit, because the press brake, not the laser, becomes the binding constraint. Flat brackets, gussets, base plates, shims, mounting plates, and gaskets all live comfortably above the folk number. A formed enclosure does not.

The corollary is worth designing around. If a heavy part needs a flange, it is often cheaper and much faster to cut two flat pieces above the forming ceiling and weld them than to find a shop that can form one thick piece. When the part has features on several faces or starts as solid stock rather than flat stock, it has left this category entirely and belongs with CNC machining companies, and once you need welding, finishing, and assembly around the cut parts, you are buying from metal fabricators rather than from a cutting service.

Cut length and pierce count set the price, not the material line on the quote

Buyers spend their negotiating energy on the material, asking whether 304 stainless could be aluminum, or whether a cheaper grade would bring the quote down. Material matters and it is never free. But on small and medium parts it is frequently a minority of the price, and the part of the quote that actually moves is machine time.

A laser is billed by how long the head is running, and the head runs in proportion to two things: the total length of the cut path and the number of pierces. Every interior hole is a pierce, a short dwell while the beam punches through before it starts travelling, and it costs time whether the hole is a quarter inch or two inches across. This is why a plate with forty small vent holes can quote higher than a larger plain plate from the same sheet, which surprises people who priced it by area. It is also why nesting matters: parts that share cut lines or sit tightly together on the sheet use less material and less travel, and platforms that nest well pass some of that back.

Thickness enters the price through speed, not through a separate charge. Doubling thickness does not double the material cost of a small part, but it does slow the cut substantially and lengthens the pierce, which is the real reason thick parts cost more than the weight suggests.

The genuinely large multiplier sits after the laser. A cut flat blank is close to pure machine time and is the cheapest thing any of these vendors can hand you. Every operation after that adds a setup and a human touch: each bend needs a press brake setup and possibly a tool change, and hardware insertion, tapping, countersinking, deburring, bead blasting, and powder coating each add their own handling and their own day. If you want to reduce a laser cutting quote, take out a secondary operation or simplify the cut path. Changing the alloy is usually the smallest lever you have.

What to put in a laser cutting RFQ so the quotes are actually comparable

Most quotes come back non comparable, and it is almost always the brief's fault rather than the shops'. Six numbers fix it.

Send a manufacturing ready file, not a picture. A DXF with closed contours in a defined unit, or a STEP file if the part is formed. Ask what the vendor expects, because a file that is fine for one engine gets rejected by the next.

Name the alloy and temper, not just the metal. 5052-H32 and 6061-T6 are both aluminum and they bend very differently. If the part is formed, the temper decides whether the bend cracks.

Give quantity at two or three volumes. This is the single most valuable line in the RFQ, because it shows you the price break curve instead of one number. SendCutSend publishes what that curve looks like on its own site: a 0.187 in 5052 aluminum part at $9.90 each for one and $3.70 each at a hundred, so the hundredth part costs about 37 percent of the first. Any shop worth using can show you its own version of that curve.

Call out tolerance only where the function needs it. SendCutSend publishes plus or minus 0.005 in on parts under 12 in and plus or minus 0.010 in over 12 in; Fabworks publishes plus or minus 0.005 in overall with features often as tight as plus or minus 0.002 in and plus or minus 0.010 in over 30 in. Those are typical. A drawing that puts one tight blanket tolerance on every dimension will be repriced upward or quietly declined.

List every secondary operation and say who does it. Bending, hardware, tapping, finishing, and whether you or the vendor installs the hardware. Silence here is where surprise line items come from.

State the delivered date you need and ask for the shipping term. Turnaround and transit are different numbers, and a 2 day cut with 5 day ground freight is a 7 day part. If you are running the same brief past a longer list of shops than you want to email by hand, an RFQ tool keeps the responses in one comparable place.