Built for Custom Shops

The Custom Shop Problem

A custom frame shop runs on variety. Every customer brings different artwork, different taste, different budget — and your moulding selection reflects that. Where a production shop might cut the same three profiles for weeks at a time, a custom shop might switch profiles twelve times in a day. That variety is your value. It's also what makes cut planning genuinely hard.

Manual cut math works fine when you're doing two or three frames. But once you're handling eight to fifteen jobs a day across a mix of profiles, remnants, and stock lengths, the mental load compounds. A missed kerf allowance on one frame throws off the next. A useful 18-inch remnant gets forgotten in the bin. You end up buying a fresh stick when the perfect offcut was right there. These aren't careless mistakes — they're the natural limits of doing optimization in your head while you're also running the front counter, managing the mat cutter, and handling customers walking in with a favor.

What a Typical Custom Shop Day Looks Like

8 a.m.: open the shop. Two work orders from yesterday are on the bench, plus a stack of cut lists from last week's production batch that didn't get finished. 9 a.m.: customer walks in with a 24×36 poster and wants "something dark, maybe two inches wide." You pull three mouldings off the wall, they pick one, you write the order. 10 a.m.: phone call, the gallery across town needs a rush on a 16×20 replacement frame. 11 a.m.: another customer, a wedding photo, needs matching frames for three sizes — 5×7, 8×10, 11×14 — all in the same profile. By lunch you have nine orders on the bench spanning six different profiles, plus whatever carries over from yesterday.

This is the day custom shops live with. The math for any single frame is straightforward — the cut length formula is the same for every frame. The hard part is figuring out how to cut all nine of those orders, with the remnants you have from last week and the fresh sticks in the rack, so the least amount of material ends up in the scrap bin. That's where the mental load starts to compound. Do you cut the gallery rush first on a fresh 120" stick and deal with the remnant later? Or do you group the gallery order with the wedding photo set because they happen to use the same moulding? Do you skip the remnants entirely because you don't remember which ones are long enough?

These aren't impossible questions. They're questions that take 15 minutes to answer correctly for every batch — and usually get answered with a rough guess because nobody has 15 minutes between walk-ins.

Where RailChop Fits In

RailChop replaces the mental load with a phone-based optimizer that runs the math before you touch the saw. You scan or enter your jobs, the app groups them by profile, finds the most efficient cut arrangement across fresh stock and remnants, and hands you a PDF cut ticket with exact machine dimensions. It runs offline — you don't need a wifi signal at the saw. And because it accounts for kerf properly across every cut on the same stick, the dimensions on the ticket are accurate to the shop floor, not back-of-envelope approximations.

The workflow fits naturally into how a custom shop already operates. A customer's work order comes in — handwritten on a carbon pad, typed into your POS, whatever your shop uses. You photograph it with AI Scan, and the parsing pulls customer name, dimensions, quantities, and profile. Or you type it in manually if the order is simple. Jobs accumulate through the day. Before you start cutting, you tap "Optimize" and the cut plan is ready — pulled from your profile library, your fresh stock, and any remnants the app is tracking. You print the PDF or work from the screen. As you cut each stick, you tap it complete. The remnants generated by each cut are saved automatically, tagged by profile, valued in dollars. Tomorrow's batch will see them.

Remnant Tracking Is Where Custom Shops Recover the Most

Custom shops run wide moulding libraries — often 40 to 100+ profiles across the wall. Most of those profiles see occasional use, not daily. Which means remnants from profile X pile up before the next order in profile X ever comes in. Without tracking, those remnants sit in the bin, age past usability, and eventually hit the dumpster.

This is where custom shops leak the most money. A high-cost gallery moulding remnant in good condition is real material value. Let it age out unused for a year-plus and it's worth zero. Multiply across a shop's full remnant bin and the untracked value adds up. RailChop's remnant tracker tags every offcut to its profile, values it in dollars, and makes it available to every future optimization. When the next matching order comes in, the remnant is automatically considered alongside fresh stock. If it fits, it gets used. No more "I think I have a remnant somewhere."

The remnant aging threshold is a separate but related feature. Set it to whatever matches your turnover. Older remnants are surfaced for use in upcoming cut plans before they age out entirely. If they truly don't fit anything, you can manually age them out or toss them. The system is actively working to clear old stock rather than letting it accumulate.

The Offline Piece Matters More Than It Sounds

A lot of framing software is cloud-only. Great for the front counter. Problematic at the saw. Saws are often in back rooms, basements, detached workshops — places where wifi is flaky or nonexistent. You don't want to be standing at the saw, cut ticket in hand, when the network drops and your planning software becomes useless.

RailChop runs entirely on-device. The optimizer, the cut plan viewer, the PDF export, remnant tracking, stock inventory — all work with zero internet. AI Scan is the one feature that needs a connection (it sends a photo to our secure server for processing), but the core shop-floor workflow doesn't depend on your wifi. For small shops with one saw in one room that is one wall away from the router, this might not feel like a big deal. For any shop with physical distance between the front counter and the cutting station, it's the difference between software that works and software that blocks the workflow.

Pricing Fits the Custom Shop Reality

Custom shops often aren't big enough to justify multi-hundred-dollar-per-month software subscriptions. That's a reasonable gate — if the software costs more than it saves, the ROI math doesn't work. RailChop is priced to solve that problem. The free tier handles three profiles, three cut days per month, and ten jobs per day — enough to genuinely try the app on real orders. The Pro tier is $9.99/month and removes limits while adding Quick Scan and remnant tracking. The Business tier is $24.99/month and includes AI Scan, cut list import, and the shop dashboard.

What that's worth depends on your shop's volume and current waste rate. The bigger your monthly moulding spend, the more even a few recovered percentage points add up. Once you've measured your own waste, the math becomes arithmetic instead of guesswork. Run the numbers on the waste calculator.

A Note on What RailChop Doesn't Do

RailChop is a cut optimizer — not a POS. It doesn't handle quoting, invoicing, customer management, or vendor catalog pricing. If you already use FrameReady, LifeSaver, Artteck, or another POS, RailChop sits alongside it on your phone without conflicting. If you don't have a POS and your counter workflow runs on paper, a POS might be a better first investment than RailChop — we'd say so honestly. See the alternatives comparison for what fits where.

That scoped design is intentional. We could build a POS. There are good POS systems already. There isn't a good mobile-first, framing-specific cut optimizer that handles remnants and works offline at the saw. That's the gap RailChop fills.