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Case Study / 01

NorCal Carports Quote Engine

A real-time steel-building configurator with an engineering-aware pricing engine, shipped to production.

Category

Lead Generation & Pricing Tools

Duration

~5 Months

Role

Solo Full Stack Developer & Domain Engineer

01 / Challenge

The business problem

A steel carport isn't a fixed product — price depends on dimensions, gauge, roof style, enclosures, openings, foundation, and (critically in the Sierra Nevada) ground snow load and site elevation. The company quoted these by hand from spreadsheets, which was slow, inconsistent between sales reps, and easy to under-price on heavy-snow builds.

02 / Strategy

Approach

  1. 01

    Encode the company's pricing and structural expertise into a single deterministic, fully typed engine.

  2. 02

    Wrap it in a guided step-by-step configurator that recomputes an itemized total live at every click.

  3. 03

    Deliver it as a static React app with the pricing math running server-side, so proprietary logic never ships to the browser.

03 / Implementation

What I built and changed

01

Guided Configurator

A 14-step React + TypeScript flow that walks a customer or rep through the whole building, with sensible defaults, validation, and a persistent estimate sidebar and floating summary bar.

  • Model the full configuration as a strongly-typed ConfigState object.
  • Cover dimensions, roof and gauge, foundation, wall enclosures, openings, finishes, permitting, and California tax region.
  • Serialize any build into a deep-link URL and exportable JSON for reuse and hand-off.
02

Deterministic Pricing Engine

A pure, ~710-line pricing module that maps a configuration onto real steel price tables — width x length base matrices for 12- and 14-gauge frames, panel-grade upgrades, per-gable and per-opening costs, anchor logic, permit fees, and region-specific sales tax.

  • Keep the engine pure and side-effect free so it is fully unit-testable.
  • Build a regression test suite around known-good configurations to guard against silent pricing breaks.
  • Expose validation and JSON serialization helpers for downstream product-page generation.
03

Applied Structural Engineering

The feature that makes the tool trustworthy: it prices each build on its real structural demand rather than a flat rate.

  • Derive ground snow load (Pg) from site elevation via a smoothed polynomial fit to Sierra Nevada / NorCal curves.
  • Convert to roof snow load (Pf) under an ASCE 7-22 framework and apply a tiered price multiplier.
  • Recommend truss spacing and preset snow loads for named Shasta, Lassen, Plumas, El Dorado, Placer, and Nevada county locations.
04

Serverless Delivery & Documents

A no-server-to-maintain deployment on Cloudflare Pages with the calculation exposed as a Pages Function, plus client-side quote generation.

  • Gate the /api/calculate endpoint behind an internal key header to keep pricing logic server-side.
  • Generate branded, itemized PDF quotes entirely in-browser with jsPDF and html2canvas.
  • Add hCaptcha, technical SEO, and schema markup for a credible public-facing tool.
04 / Outcomes

Business results

  • Replaced slow, inconsistent manual estimates with an itemized quote generated in minutes.

  • Prices heavy-snow mountain builds and flat valley builds on their real structural loads, not a flat rate.

  • Produces branded, defensible PDF quotes and reusable deep-link / JSON configurations on demand.

  • Keeps proprietary pricing math server-side while running on a globally-distributed, near-zero-ops Cloudflare deployment.

05 / Takeaway

What the work proved

Encoding messy real-world expertise — structural codes, tax jurisdictions, and pricing tables — into clean, typed, testable code turns a slow expert process into a fast, consistent product.