The end of the race to the bottom.
Lattitive uses trimmed-median pricing across qualified UK supplier bids. The result is a stable, fair-market price — sustainable for suppliers, predictable for customers.
Traditional RFQ marketplaces optimise for one thing: the lowest possible price. Suppliers cut margins to win the bid. Quality erodes. Lead times slip. The cheapest supplier on a quote sheet rarely turns out to be the cheapest supplier on the invoice — and almost never the cheapest on the rework.
Lattitive flips the model. Customers never see individual supplier prices. We collect bids confidentially across three modes — Fastest, Standard, Cheapest — and apply a trimmed median: drop the highest, drop the lowest, and take the median of what remains. That figure becomes the Network Price.
Outliers are excluded. The price you see reflects what a competent UK manufacturer should actually charge to do the job properly.
Eligibility, not auction
Once the Network Price is set, eligible suppliers are those whose bid sits at or below 10% above the network price. Eligibility is binary — within band or out. From the eligible pool, allocation is based on lead time, reliability score and live capacity. The winner doesn't underprice the work. They demonstrate they can do it well, on time, with capacity to spare.
Why this works
Suppliers keep the margin that funds machines, materials and qualified staff. Customers get a predictable, audit-ready price with realistic lead times. The UK additive manufacturing ecosystem grows healthier, not thinner.