Frequently Asked Questions

SKUit is a SaaS application that helps network engineers build a validated Bill of Materials (BOM) for switches, routers, firewalls and load balancers. We combine a curated knowledge base of vendor products with a workflow-based chat engine so you can go from a use case description to a complete, orderable BOM in minutes instead of days.

Network engineers, consultants, system integrators, channel partners, and pre-sales teams — anyone who needs to produce an accurate Bill of Materials they’d be willing to put their name on.

General-purpose chatbots generate plausible-looking SKUs from training data, which is a problem when there are millions of valid combinations of chassis, line cards, supervisors, optics, licenses and accessories — and only some of them work together. SKUit validates every SKU against a structured knowledge graph before it lands in your BOM. If a SKU isn’t in our graph, it doesn’t make it into your BOM. That’s the difference between a BOM you can submit and one you have to triple-check.

All of the information we have is from publicly available sources, and is combined with expert knowledge to deliver a curated Bill of Materials.

We support major networking vendors and we’re actively expanding the list. Once you log in, the Use Case picker will show you which vendor families are currently available for the use case you’re building for.

Today: campus and data-centre switches (fixed and modular), with routers, firewalls and load balancers in active development. We’ve deliberately gone deep on switching first because that’s where the combinatorial explosion of SKUs is the worst.

Yes. For modular chassis we model line-card slots, supervisor slots, blanking plates, fan trays, port speeds per line card, and supervisor ↔ line-card compatibility. When you tell SKUit how many ports you need, we’ll project both stack and chassis configurations side-by-side — including total RU, blocking ratios where they apply, and which line cards fit the speeds you asked for.

Currently, no. We’re not confident we have enough data on End-of-Life products to provide a reliable Bill of Materials. We mark EoL platforms in our knowledge base so they’re visible but excluded from new builds; if a product reaches EoL after you’ve built a BOM, that BOM is still yours.

Our research pipeline re-runs against vendor source material on an ongoing basis, and we re-enrich a product family whenever a vendor updates its datasheet, ordering guide or licensing documentation. New families and product lines are added continuously.

You start with a use case (e.g. campus access, data-centre top-of-rack, WAN edge). SKUit asks you a focused series of questions about port counts, speeds, PoE, redundancy, management mode, licensing and so on, and at each step it narrows the field of candidate products. Every recommendation is grounded in a rule set written by network experts, and every SKU added to your BOM is validated against our knowledge graph before it appears.

Both flows are supported. If you already know you want, say, “Catalyst 9300 48-port”, name it and we’ll skip the use-case picker and go straight to building. If you’d rather start from the requirements, the use-case path will lead you to a recommendation.

Yes. Whenever you ask “what’s the difference between X and Y?” mid-build, SKUit produces a deterministic side-by-side table covering port counts, speeds, capacity, licensing model, market position and other relevant fields. You can also build the same use case across different vendors and export them together for procurement or evaluation.

Because the right answer depends on factors that aren’t obvious from port counts alone — rack-unit budget, blocking vs non-blocking forwarding, supervisor redundancy, in-service software upgrade behaviour, and lifecycle cost. SKUit projects both options against your requirements and surfaces the trade-offs so you can decide deliberately, not by accident.

We always present the optics choices to you, even when only one option is technically valid. Optics decisions involve fibre type, distance, power budget and sometimes vendor preference, and we don’t want to silently make those calls on your behalf. What we do filter is incompatible options — if a transceiver isn’t supported on the line card or platform you’ve picked, you won’t see it.

Because the transceiver SKU depends on it. Multi-mode fibre (with short-reach transceivers like SR/SR4) is typically used for in-rack and intra-building runs up to a few hundred metres; single-mode fibre (with LR/LR4) is used for longer reaches. The distance you need drives both the transceiver type and the cost. SKUit handles direct-attach copper (DAC) and active optical cables (AOC) as well, where the cable length is part of the SKU itself.

We only show license tiers and terms that have a real, corresponding SKU in our knowledge graph for the platform you picked. If a vendor publishes Premier as a tier but doesn’t offer a Premier SKU for your specific platform/term combination, we’d rather hide it than let you select an option that wouldn’t survive procurement.

All of it. SKUit calculates power supply count and redundancy (N+1, N+N) based on platform draw and your redundancy requirement, picks the right fan modules and trays for the chassis or fixed switch, fills empty slots with the correct blanking plates, and adds rack-mount kits where the platform requires them.

Yes — we ask which region the equipment is being deployed in and add the appropriate power-cord SKUs (NEMA, IEC, BS, AS/NZS, etc.) for the AC PSUs you’ve selected.

Yes. Break-out is a first-class concept in SKUit. When the port architecture you’ve described requires breaking a higher-rate port into multiple lower-rate links (4×10G from 40G, 4×25G from 100G, 4×100G from 400G, etc.), we’ll add the appropriate break-out cable or transceiver SKU and tag it against the correct parent port.

Excel (multi-tab when you’re exporting a project that contains several BOMs) and CSV. Both formats are designed to drop cleanly into procurement tools and ERP imports.

Yes. Saved BOMs become starting points for future builds — you can clone a previous build, change the parts that differ, and re-export. This is one of the bigger reasons enterprise teams adopt SKUit: the second BOM for a similar deployment takes minutes.

On Enterprise plans, yes — BOMs and projects can be shared within your organisation, with role-based access. Individual plans are per-user.

Yes. BOMs are tenant-isolated and only visible to you (or, on Enterprise plans, to teammates you’ve explicitly shared with). We do not use your BOM contents to train models or sell data — see our Privacy Policy for the full picture.

Yes, we can! In our paid subscription, you have the option to upload a BOM to us and we will validate it against our knowledge base.

Every SKU added to your BOM has to exist in our knowledge graph with valid compatibility relationships to whatever it’s attaching to (chassis, line card, port, license tier, etc.). If a step can’t find a matching SKU, it refuses to advance rather than making one up. This is deliberately stricter than what general-purpose chatbots do, and it’s the main reason BOMs built in SKUit hold up under procurement scrutiny.

We’d rather flag a gap than fabricate a value. Our research pipeline tags every fact with one of three trust levels — Verified, Needs Review, or Could Not Verify — and surfaces them honestly in the admin views. If a piece of data you’d need to complete a BOM is missing, you’ll see it; you won’t silently get a wrong answer.

There’s a free Basic plan (10 BOMs / month), a Pro plan for individual consultants and engineers, and Enterprise plans for teams. The full breakdown is on the Pricing page.

Two reasons. First, list pricing rarely matches what you actually pay — your vendor or partner relationship determines that, and pricing varies by region, deal size and discount programme. Second, we’d rather be the most accurate technical BOM builder than a half-accurate price quoter. We do show a market-position indicator on each product so you have a sense of where it sits, but the price itself comes from your vendor or partner alongside the BOM we generate.

Quota is consumed when you commit to a platform — the moment SKUit has done meaningful work selecting a real product family for you, not when you complete the BOM and not when you send a chat message. This way, exploring use cases and comparing vendors doesn’t burn through your monthly allowance, but real builds do.

Customer-owned pricing (where you upload your own list and negotiated discounts and SKUit re-prices BOMs against them) is on the roadmap for Enterprise plans. End-of-Life BOM building will follow once we’re confident in the underlying data. If either is critical for you, let us know — user demand shapes the priority order.