For shop leadership
What Thomasnet and Xometry really cost a machine shop
When a program ends and the backlog thins, a US job shop has four familiar ways to find work and one newer one. This page compares what each actually costs in a year, what it gets you, and what it quietly takes away — including the trade-offs of the model we sell.
A directory listing (Thomasnet and similar)
Cost: Roughly $7,000–$10,000 a year for a listing; programs that boost placement cost more.
What you get: Buyers who are already searching for your capability find you. The leads that arrive are warm and pre-qualified by intent — they came looking for a shop like yours.
What you give up: Patience and money up front. The listing is passive: if a buyer searches for a different phrase than the one you bought, or is not searching at all, nothing happens. Backlog gaps do not wait for the annual contract to pay off.
A quoting marketplace (Xometry partner network and similar)
Cost: Free to join.
What you get: A steady stream of RFQs the day you are approved. For a shop with an idle machine and no pipeline at all, volume is volume.
What you give up: Your name and your margin. You become anonymous capacity bidding against every other shop on price, and the buyer never learns who you are — so the relationship, the repeat work and the design-partner position all stay with the platform, not with you.
An industrial marketing agency or SDR agency
Cost: Commonly $2,000–$5,000 a month on retainer; booked-meeting models run roughly $150–$1,700 per meeting.
What you get: Outbound activity without hiring anyone, and a weekly report that shows what was done.
What you give up: Payments for activity, not for work. Retainers buy impressions, emails and appointments — none of which are quotable jobs. A meeting with a buyer who has no part out is still a meeting you paid for.
Hire in-house (an SDR, or the VP of Sales cold-calling)
Cost: A loaded SDR commonly runs $10,000+ a month; the fallback is the VP of Sales researching buyers between quotes, at 6pm.
What you get: Full control and institutional knowledge. A good inside salesperson who learns your capability profile becomes valuable over years.
What you give up: Months of ramp and salary paid before the first delivered buyer, plus turnover risk — the churn on SDR hires is famously high, and the book of research walks out the door with them.
Outbound, paid per delivered buyer (what VoronConnect does)
Cost: Priced per qualified RFQ conversation, set per campaign before sending starts. No retainer, no setup fee, and you never pay for a conversation that fails qualification.
What you get: Named buyers — a specific person at a specific company, talking about a specific part, quantity, material and timeline — delivered under your shop’s own name, with your certifications and machine list attached.
What you give up: The trade-off stated plainly: this is research-and-outreach, not inbound. It puts buyers in front of you; it does not build a brand buyers search for. A shop that wants an inbound engine still needs a directory or content working alongside it. And per-buyer pricing means your monthly spend moves with results, which makes budgeting less flat than a retainer.
How to choose
Match the tool to the gap. If buyers are already searching for your exact capability and you can wait out a contract, a directory listing is the lowest-friction way to catch them. If you need machine-hours covered this month and can accept commodity pricing, a marketplace partner network does that. If you can afford six months of runway before results, an in-house hire compounds best. If you need quotable conversations with named buyers and want to pay only when one arrives, that is per-delivered-buyer outbound — how VoronConnect prices it, and what a delivered buyer looks like.
Whichever mix you pick, ask every vendor the same question: will I pay for a named buyer talking about a specific part, or for activity that might lead to one? The answer tells you which column of this page you are really in.
VoronConnect is run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp — which is how we can price per conversation.