Commercial terms
Pricing on request — and what it is made of
We do not publish a rate card, and the reason is not coyness. The same request — “cycle these cells” — can occupy three channels for nine days or twelve channels for fourteen weeks. A price list would be wrong in both directions. What we can publish is the structure, so that a quotation arrives without surprises in it.
| Unit | Measured as | Driven by |
|---|---|---|
| Channel-hour | one cycling channel, occupied | protocol duration, number of replicates |
| Chamber-day | one chamber, per calendar day | temperature groups, calendar ageing |
| Glove box hour | operator time inside the box | teardown, cell building, electrolyte work |
| Preparation hour | coating, punching, assembly, weighing | number of electrodes and cells built |
| Instrument run | per diffraction pattern or CT stack | number of samples, scan settings |
| Analysis hour | fitting, comparison, writing | how many questions the report answers |
| Report | flat, per job | fixed, includes one revision round |
| Shelf-month | storage beyond the 90-day retention | only if you ask us to keep material |
Shipping, customs charges and third-party analytical work are passed through at cost with the invoice attached, never marked up.
A worked composition
Take the most common job we quote: NG-CYC-01 on nine coin cells in three groups, six weeks, with impedance at three states of charge before and after. The proportions come out close to this, job after job:
| Component | Share | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Channel occupancy | 41 % | nine channels for six weeks, including reference tests |
| Chamber occupancy | 13 % | one chamber, shared with other jobs where temperatures match |
| Preparation and intake | 14 % | weighing, holder assembly, documentation |
| Impedance measurements | 9 % | six spectra, lead compensation, drift checks |
| Analysis and report | 23 % | the part clients consistently underestimate |
The lesson in that table is the last line. Close to a quarter of a six-week job is a person sitting with the data, and a request to “just send the raw files, no report” saves roughly a fifth of the total — we do quote that way when asked, and the method sheet is still included, because raw data without the protocol as executed is not usable later.
The cheapest thing you can do to a quotation is to shorten the protocol. The second cheapest is to drop from four temperature groups to two. Reducing replicates below three does not save money in proportion and we will argue against it for the reasons on the methodology page.
Rush means your job starts ahead of the queue on the overview page. There is no way to do that without pushing somebody else back, so it is priced as a surcharge on the whole job and it is only available when the displaced client agrees to the delay. We ask them; we do not reshuffle silently.
- Rush on preparation and impedance is usually possible within a week.
- Rush on cycling is a start-date change, not a duration change. Six weeks of cycling takes six weeks regardless of what anybody pays.
- Teardown rush is the most effective, since the limit there is operator time rather than elapsed time.
The honest version: if your deadline is in four weeks and the method takes six, no amount of money fixes that. Tell us the deadline first and we will propose a shorter method rather than a faster version of the long one.
Six lines, and we can price it
- Chemistry and format, to whatever level of detail you can share before a confidentiality agreement.
- Number of samples you can actually ship, and by when.
- The question. “Does coating B beat coating A at 45 °C” prices differently from “characterise this material”.
- Method codes if you know them, or the protocol if it is yours.
- Your deadline, and whether it is a real one.
- Billing entity and whether a purchase order number is needed on the invoice.
Quotations are issued within three working days, are valid for 30 days, and state the deliverables, the turnaround from intake, and the assumptions we made where your six lines left something open. Work starts against a written order; we do not invoice for anything that was not ordered in writing.
University groups publishing the result get a reduced rate on analysis hours and on the report. The condition is simply that the measurement conditions appear in the publication — our method code is enough — so that the numbers remain interpretable by somebody who reads it in five years.
Write to info@nickelgrid.cloud. If a confidentiality agreement has to come first, send yours; ours is two pages and we will send it on request.