The $1,014 Spread on an Inconel 718 Bar RFQ

On one Inconel 718 bar RFQ, the quotes that came back in the same week ranged from $5,741 to $4,727. Nobody negotiated that gap. It was in the market the whole time, and the buyer only saw it by casting a wide net.

On the same RFQ, in the same week, two quotes gave a real Sourceworks user an idea of what the high and low market price was for Inconel 718 bar. Of all the quotes the user received, $5,741 and $4,727 represented the high and low prices for the Inconel 718 bar they sought. Had the user gone to one or maybe a small handful of sources they wouldn't have experienced the full range of market pricing and could have missed out on that $1,014 savings.

The Sourceworks team has been buying and selling metals and materials long enough to know that nobody in this trade is surprised a spread exists for the exact same material spec. What can be surprising sometimes is the size of the spread.

What the high and low looked like

Every source was quoting the same material and the same quantity, in the same week. And 718 isn't an obscure item. It's the most widely used nickel-base superalloy there is, and any specialty metals house either has a position in it or knows exactly who does.

We don't know why the two ends of the range landed 18% apart, and neither did the user. Could be inventory position. Could be the mill the bar came from. Could be how badly one source wanted the order that week, or a rep rounding up on a slow Tuesday. It doesn't matter. The user didn't need to know why. They only needed to know that both numbers existed.

The spread is not a discount

Here's the part that gets missed. You cannot negotiate your way from $5,741 down to $4,727 with one source. Push a good rep hard and you might get a few points off. The $1,014 gap in this case didn't come from pushing or negotiating. It came from another source who priced the same bar differently for reasons of their own.

So the spread isn't leverage. It's information. And it's information you only have if you source effectively.

If this user had sent the RFQ to the high source alone, they'd have paid $5,741. They likely would have thought it was a fair price (it isn't an outrageous number for 718), cut the PO, and never known. That's a normal outcome. It's not a mistake. It's just what happens when one quote is all you've got.

Why one or two quotes rarely reveal the market

We looked at a sample of RFQs sent through Sourceworks where the same spec went to multiple sources in the same week. Across the sample, the lowest quote came in a median of 22% below the highest, about $1,458 spread per RFQ (this particular sample had an average order value of about $5,000).

The median hides the range, though. On 4140 annealed plate the spread was 12%. On T304 stainless tube it was 73%. The 718 bar came in at 18%, toward the lower end, and it still worked out to over a thousand dollars because 718 is expensive to begin with. A modest percentage on a high-value material is a lot of money.

The low number also isn't evenly spread across the market. It's usually one source who happens to be long that item this month, or who bought it right, or who has a truck going your way anyway. With two quotes you've got one spread, and it's whatever those two sources happened to be. With a dozen, you're far more likely to have found the real high and the real low. And while more quotes don't necessarily guarantee a better number, they give you confidence you've revealed the market.

Why most buyers never see the market

The honest reason buyers don't go wide is time. Finding and building a quality source list, writing the RFQ email, copying it, fixing the greeting, attaching the print, sending it to eight sources, and then keeping track of who replied is an afternoon. It's easier to just hit up the one or two sources they've used before. That's not laziness. It's a rational response to what high-quality, volume outreach costs.

Taking that cost out is most of what we built Sourceworks to do: upload your go-to sources and supplement them with new ones from our vetted database or from our intelligent source discovery engine, SCOUT AI; create one RFQ email to any combination of sources with one click; and in one send, from your own email, contact them all simultaneously. Every RFQ outreach is automatically logged so you have the full list of who was contacted for what and when. Input the responses you receive until you have enough information about the market to make a buying decision.

Try a wider net next time

Pick one item you buy regularly. Next time it comes up, send the RFQ to every source you've got, plus a few you haven't tried. Log what comes back.

Or you can run it through Sourceworks for free. See below for getting started with a free account. If you aren't convinced, send your RFQ to us by email to support@sourceworks.us — we'll send back a video of it in Sourceworks plus a list of vetted and SCOUT AI sources to reach out to.