About Open Factory

We cover the physical layer: transformers, switchgear, gensets and turbines, chillers and liquid cooling, machine tools, robots, drives and controls, and the grid connections and tariffs that gate all of it. We publish what things cost, how long they take to arrive, who is late, who discloses, and what to write into the purchase order.

Most of the charts come from our own models: the Lead-Time Monitor, the Public Bid-Tab Price Book, the Large-Load Cost Table, the Datacenter MEP Cost Table, the OEM Disclosure Scorecard and the Book-to-Bill League Table. The model pages say what each one is compiled from and which version it is. Version 0.x means public records and published methodology, with no proprietary survey yet.

Who writes this

Open Factory is written by its founder, who spent six months in 2024 and early 2025 on the diligence to buy an electrical contractor: settled a lease, bought equipment, hired a master electrician, started the SBA loan, then walked away when labor rates and licensing timelines broke the capital plan. That is where the habit of reading quotes started. Before that came years of building and benchmarking software systems, which is why the tools here are software and not PDFs.

How the work is done

Articles start from public records: filings, tariffs, dockets, procurement awards, agency series, OEM bulletins. Each number links to the document it came from. Models are built from those records first and from contributed data second, under the cell-size rules on the methodology page. Companies that are rated or criticised see the text before it runs.

Where to find us

Weekly letter on the subscribe page. Corrections to [email protected]. Everything else to [email protected].