Custom Synthesis RFQ: What to Include

A custom synthesis RFQ is the most leveraged document in the outsourcing process, and it is routinely the least carefully written. Buyers spend weeks selecting candidate suppliers, then send those suppliers a two-line email containing a compound name and a request for pricing. The suppliers reply with questions. The buyer answers some of them, forwards others to a chemist who is traveling, and by the time a real quote lands, ten business days have passed on a project that was already late.

Here is the part that stays hidden: the delay does not show up anywhere in the commercial record. The quote is dated the day it was issued. The lead time is quoted from purchase order. The four to ten days consumed by clarification sit outside both numbers, absorbed entirely by the buyer’s schedule. Suppliers do not report it, and buyers rarely measure it. In practice, incomplete RFQs are one of the largest recoverable sources of schedule loss in early-stage chemistry outsourcing, and the fix costs about thirty minutes of writing.

There is a second, subtler cost. An incomplete RFQ does not just delay the quote — it degrades it. A chemist who does not know your intended use will default to a defensive assumption, quoting a higher purity, a heavier analytical package, and a longer timeline than you needed, because guessing high protects them from a requote conversation later. You then pay for characterization you never asked for, or you get a number so high you eliminate a supplier who would have been a good fit at the real specification.

This post walks through the RFQ field by field. For each one, the question is not just what to write but what a chemist does differently once they know it. It sits inside our CRO buyer’s guide cluster; if you are still at the stage of deciding who to send the RFQ to, start there.

Structure: SMILES or InChI Plus a Drawn Image

Always send a machine-readable structure and a picture. A chemical name is not a specification, and this single omission causes more requoting than any other field in the RFQ.

Names fail in three specific ways, all of which change the price.

Salt Form Ambiguity

“Compound X hydrochloride” and “Compound X” are different materials with different molecular weights, different solubility, different crystallization behavior, and often different final-step chemistry. A buyer who orders the free base and needed the salt has bought a compound that requires an extra step and a fresh purity determination. Say explicitly which form you want, and say whether the alternative is acceptable — many buyers genuinely do not care, and telling the chemist that removes a constraint that might otherwise cost them a step.

Stereochemistry Hidden in the Name

Common names very often carry no stereochemical information at all. Between a racemate and a single enantiomer at high enantiomeric excess, the cost difference is rarely small — it can be a factor of several, because the enantiopure route may require a chiral auxiliary, an asymmetric catalyst, a resolution with a yield ceiling of 50 percent, or a chiral preparative separation. If the name does not encode it, the chemist must either ask or guess, and a guess in the expensive direction is what protects them.

Tautomers and Regiochemistry

Heterocycles are the usual offender. An indazole, a triazole, or a pyrazole can be substituted at more than one nitrogen, and the resulting isomers are separable compounds with different properties and different syntheses. 3-Amino-1H-indazole (CAS 874-05-5) is a good illustration: the 1H designation in the name is doing real work, and a request that drops it is genuinely ambiguous. A SMILES string is not ambiguous.

What to send: a SMILES or InChI string as text in the body of the email or RFQ document, plus an image of the drawn structure. Two representations, because they cross-check each other. If the SMILES was generated by drawing the structure and exporting, and the image came from the same drawing, a transcription error in either one is visible.

Stereochemistry: Which Centers, What Level, By Which Method

State each defined stereocenter, the required enantiomeric or diastereomeric excess as a number, and the analytical method that will demonstrate it. All three parts matter, and the third is the one buyers omit.

Two suppliers can both certify “99 percent ee” and mean different things, because they ran different methods. Chiral HPLC with one column and mobile phase can resolve a pair of enantiomers well enough to integrate honestly; a different column can co-elute a portion of the minor isomer under the tail of the major one and report a flattering number. Chiral supercritical fluid chromatography can give a third answer. None of these suppliers is lying. They are answering different questions.

Writing a Stereochemistry Specification

A workable specification reads like this:

Single enantiomer, (S) configuration at C-2. Minimum 98 percent ee by chiral HPLC. Method to be agreed before manufacture; if the supplier proposes their own method, provide the chromatogram of a racemic standard demonstrating baseline resolution.

That last clause is the one that does the work. A racemic standard chromatogram showing baseline resolution proves the method can see the minor enantiomer. Without it, a 99 percent ee result is an assertion rather than a measurement. It costs the supplier one injection to produce.

For material where a defined center is carried in from a starting material rather than created in the route, say so. Chiral building blocks such as (S)-N-BOC-Prolinal (CAS 69610-41-9) let a chemist inherit stereochemistry from a commercial source instead of setting it, which is faster and cheaper — but only if the route is designed with that in mind and the epimerization risk at the relevant step is assessed. Aldehydes alpha to a stereocenter are a known epimerization hazard, and a chemist who knows the center is critical will pick conditions that protect it.

If you genuinely do not need a single enantiomer — for an early screening compound, for example — say that too. “Racemate acceptable” is one of the most valuable sentences an RFQ can contain.

Quantity: The Real Amount, and Whether More Follows

Give the amount you actually need, then say whether repeat orders are likely and at roughly what scale. The second half changes the chemistry more than the first half does.

Buyers routinely round up “to be safe.” It is a false economy at small scale. Going from 5 grams to 25 grams often triples the price without helping you, because the extra material may need a larger final purification, more starting material purchased in a larger pack size, and a different vessel. Meanwhile, the answer to “will there be more?” restructures the entire proposal.

Why the Repeat-Order Question Changes the Route

Situation	Route a chemist proposes	Rationale
One-time, 1 to 10 g, no repeats expected	Shortest linear sequence; expensive reagents acceptable; chromatography at every step	Total reagent cost is small at this scale; developer time is the dominant cost, so minimize steps
One-time now, kilograms likely within 12 months	Same target, but chemist flags which steps will not scale and may quote a small route-scouting add-on	Avoids a full redevelopment later; the scale-up blockers are cheapest to find now
Repeat orders confirmed, 100 g to 1 kg each	Longer route with cheaper inputs, crystallization instead of chromatography, telescoped steps	Reagent and purification cost dominate; step count is worth trading against unit cost
Multi-kilogram, ongoing	Full process development; hazard assessment; solvent recovery considered	Now a process chemistry project, not a synthesis order

The middle two rows are where most buyers lose money. A discovery team orders 10 grams without mentioning that a tox campaign is scheduled for the following year, gets a route built entirely around silica gel chromatography, and then discovers that route cannot deliver 3 kilograms at any price. The redevelopment costs more than the original order and, worse, arrives at the point in the program where schedule is least forgiving. Our post on custom synthesis from milligram to multi-ton covers where the practical breakpoints sit.

One sentence prevents all of it: “This is 10 grams for in vitro work; if the series advances we expect to need 2 to 5 kilograms in Q3 next year. Please flag anything in your proposed route that will not scale.”

Purity: A Number, A Method, and an Intended Use

A purity specification needs all three components. A number alone is not a specification, because different methods on the same lot will return different numbers, and none of them tells the chemist which impurities matter.

Number Plus Method

“Ninety-eight percent” is under-specified. These are all different requirements:

• 98 percent by HPLC area at 254 nm — a relative measure that assumes every component absorbs similarly at that wavelength, which is rarely true. Impurities without a chromophore are invisible. This is the most commonly quoted and the weakest.
• 98 percent by HPLC area, ELSD or CAD detection — catches non-chromophoric impurities that UV misses; a meaningfully harder specification.
• 98 percent weight-by-weight assay against a reference standard — a true mass-based number. Strictly harder than any area percent figure, and the one to use when the material’s absolute amount matters.
• 98 percent by quantitative NMR — a mass-based assay that needs no reference standard of the analyte itself; useful when no standard exists.
• 98 percent by GC area — appropriate for volatiles, meaningless for anything that will not survive an injection port.

Requesting the wrong one costs money in both directions. Asking for w/w assay on an early screening compound buys you accuracy you will not use. Accepting area percent on a compound that will be weighed out for a dose-response curve can leave you with a material that is 98 percent pure by area and 91 percent by mass, with the balance being residual solvent and water — which quietly shifts every concentration in the experiment.

Add What the Material Is For

One sentence about intended use lets a chemist reason about which impurities are tolerable. Consider:

• “For in vitro screening at up to 100 micromolar” — the chemist knows that a trace of residual palladium is irrelevant but a 2 percent impurity that is itself biologically active is a real problem.
• “For an in vivo PK study, dosed at 10 mg/kg” — now residual solvents and heavy metals matter, and a Karl Fischer water determination becomes worth requesting.
• “To be used as an analytical reference standard” — now w/w assay, full characterization, and a mass balance across all detected impurities are the actual requirement, and the price reflects that.
• “As a starting material for the next step in our own lab” — the chemist can potentially skip a purification if the impurity carries through benignly. Tell them what reaction comes next and they may save you money.

That last case is underused. If your intermediate goes straight into a Suzuki coupling, a chemist can often tell you which impurities will be removed by the workup of that coupling and which will not. A common building block such as 4-Bromophenylboronic acid (CAS 5467-74-3) carries a known set of related impurities — boroxine anhydride, protodeboronated arene, residual boronic ester — that behave predictably in a downstream coupling. A supplier who knows the next step can specify against the impurities that actually survive it. The broader boronic acids category shows how much the useful specification varies across a single compound class.

Analytical Package and Documentation Level

Name the analytical deliverables and the regulatory level explicitly. These are the two fields with the largest price leverage in the entire RFQ, and they are the two most often left blank.

The Three Analytical Tiers

Tier	Contents	Typical use	Cost impact
COA only	Identity, purity by the stated method, appearance, lot number	Bulk intermediates, materials going into your own next step	Baseline
COA plus spectra	Above plus proton NMR and LC-MS or HPLC trace	Discovery compounds, most research-grade orders	Small, often single-digit percent
Full characterization	Above plus carbon NMR, HRMS, elemental analysis, residual solvents by GC headspace, water by Karl Fischer, elemental impurities by ICP-OES	Reference standards, regulated work, material entering a filing	Can add materially, particularly at small scale where analysis is a large fraction of total cost

The middle tier is the right default for most discovery work and costs very little more than the first. Ask for it by name. Note that analytical cost does not scale with quantity — running a residual solvent panel costs the same on 2 grams as on 2 kilograms — which means the full-characterization tier is proportionally most expensive exactly where buyers are least prepared for it, on small orders.

Documentation and Regulatory Level

State one of three levels:

1. Research use only. No GMP claims, standard lot documentation, no formal change control. Fastest and cheapest. Correct for the overwhelming majority of discovery chemistry.
2. GMP-like or GMP-ready. Non-GMP manufacture with enhanced documentation: recorded batch instructions, retained samples, defined analytical methods, traceable starting materials. A useful middle ground when material may later need to support a filing narrative. Ask suppliers exactly what they mean by the term, because it is not a defined standard and definitions vary widely between facilities.
3. Full GMP. Manufacture under a quality system with qualified equipment, validated methods, QA batch release, and audit-ready records. The FDA guidance on GMP for APIs and ICH Q7 define the expectations. This is a different commercial conversation entirely, with a different price and a different timeline.

Buyers sometimes write “GMP” into an RFQ as a general signal of seriousness, without needing it. It is an expensive signal. Our comparison of GMP versus non-GMP chemical manufacturing walks through where the boundary genuinely sits.

Timeline: The Date and the Consequence

Give a needed-by date and state what happens if it slips. The consequence is what tells a supplier whether to quote a standard path or an expedited one.

There is a real difference between these three requests, and they should not all be written as “ASAP”:

• “Needed by 15 November; if it slips a week that is fine.” The supplier can schedule it into normal queue flow and quote standard pricing.
• “Needed by 15 November; a slip delays a tox study start and pushes the IND by a quarter.” Now the supplier knows to quote a protected slot, possibly with parallel routes on the risky step, and to tell you honestly if they cannot commit.
• “No hard date, we want it when it is ready.” The supplier can slot it as filler work, which is often the cheapest way to buy chemistry. Genuinely say this when it is true — flexible timing is a real lever on price.

Asking for “ASAP” on everything trains suppliers to discount your urgency, and eventually the one request that truly is urgent gets treated like the others.

What a Realistic Timeline Looks Like

For a novel small molecule with no established route, a reasonable expectation is two to four weeks of route scouting and a first delivery in eight to sixteen weeks depending on step count and how much of the sequence is precedented. A known compound with literature precedent and available starting materials can run three to six weeks. These are rough ranges and vary substantially by chemistry, facility loading, and starting material lead times — a single starting material on an eight-week import lead time sets the floor for the whole project regardless of how fast the chemistry is.

Ask suppliers to break the quoted lead time into starting material procurement, chemistry, purification, and analysis. It is a fair question, and the answer tells you where the schedule risk actually lives.

Route Information, Starting Materials, and Constraints

Send everything you already know. Withholding route information does not protect you, and it reliably costs you.

Prior Art and Failed Routes

If your own lab attempted this compound and failed, say so and say how. “We tried the obvious reductive amination and got significant over-alkylation” saves the supplier a week of rediscovering it, and that week is on your schedule. Buyers occasionally hold back failed-route information out of a vague concern about looking unprepared. It has the opposite effect — it reads as competence, and it is what a chemist would want to know.

Likewise, send any literature references you have found, even if you are not sure they are relevant. A patent example with a partial procedure is genuinely valuable. A chemist will assess it faster than you can and will tell you whether it is a real precedent or a paper route.

Starting Materials You Can Supply

If you have material on the shelf, say what and how much. Supplying a starting material can remove weeks of procurement lead time from the project and reduce the quote. It also introduces an obligation: the supplier will need a COA for anything you send, and will usually want to run an identity check before committing it to a batch. Expect that, and send the COA with the material.

Common commercially available inputs — 2-Chloropyrimidine (CAS 1722-12-9) for SNAr chemistry, or a fluorinated amine fragment such as 4,4-difluoropiperidine — are worth naming in the RFQ if you already know you want them in the route, because it tells the chemist you have a structural preference rather than only an endpoint. The heterocyclic compounds category covers most of the common cores in this space.

Hazard and Handling Constraints

State anything you know about the compound’s hazards, and state any constraints on your side. Relevant items:

• Known or suspected genotoxicity, cytotoxicity, or sensitization
• Compounds requiring containment above standard fume hood practice
• Any azide, peroxide-forming, or highly energetic functionality in the target or a likely intermediate
• Air or moisture sensitivity that affects packaging and shipping
• Light sensitivity requiring amber glass or foil overwrap
• Your own site’s handling restrictions — some receiving labs cannot accept certain hazard classes at all

A supplier who discovers a containment requirement after quoting will requote. Better to surface it in the RFQ. The OSHA hazard communication standard sets the labeling and safety data sheet expectations for whatever ships, and the NIST Chemistry WebBook is a useful first check on physical properties that affect handling; our post on GHS labeling requirements and common mistakes covers what should arrive with the material.

IP, Confidentiality, and NDA Status

State your NDA position in the RFQ itself. Three options, and the right one depends on how disclosive the structure is:

1. NDA already in place. Reference it by date. Send the full structure.
2. NDA required before disclosure. Say so, and send a redacted or generic structure — often a Markush or a partial scaffold is enough for a supplier to give a range and a feasibility read while the NDA executes in parallel.
3. No NDA needed. Common for known compounds and literature molecules. Say it explicitly, because otherwise a cautious supplier may pause to ask.

Also state who owns any process IP developed during the work. It is worth resolving before the quote rather than during contracting, because it can change the price — a supplier who cannot reuse a developed method may price the development differently than one who can.

Shipping, Packaging, and Import Constraints

Give the ship-to country and any known import constraints. Cross-border shipments of research chemicals can add one to three weeks and occasionally fail outright on documentation. Specify packaging if you have a preference: amber glass, foil pouch, inert atmosphere, specific vial sizes for automated handling, or aliquoted into a defined number of portions. Aliquoting requested after the fact means reopening a container and repeating a QC step.

If you need material shipped to multiple sites, say so in the RFQ. It affects packaging, documentation, and sometimes the batch strategy.

Budget: Why Sharing It Gets You a Better Answer

Give a budget range. The common objection is that disclosing a budget invites the supplier to quote up to it, and there is some truth in that — but the cost of withholding is usually larger, and here is the specific mechanism.

A custom synthesis quote is not a price for a fixed deliverable. It is a price for a proposed approach, and there are usually several approaches available at different price points. A chemist who knows your ceiling can do three useful things:

1. Tell you quickly that the target is not achievable at that number. This is the single most valuable output of an RFQ, and it takes a day rather than three weeks.
2. Propose a scoped-down option that fits. Lower purity tier, smaller quantity with a repeat option, a lighter analytical package, a longer timeline in exchange for queue flexibility. None of these are visible to a supplier who does not know your constraint.
3. Decline early. A supplier who cannot serve you at that level should say so on day one rather than producing an aspirational quote that wastes both sides a week.

Without a range, suppliers guess your intent from the RFQ’s tone, and quotes come back scattered across an order of magnitude — not because the chemistry is uncertain but because each supplier has assumed a different specification. That scatter is not useful information. It is noise you generated.

A workable phrasing: “Our budget for this is in the range of X to Y. If the chemistry does not support that, tell us what would fit and what we would give up.” That framing signals you will not simply accept the ceiling, and it invites the tradeoff conversation that produces a good decision. Our detailed treatment of the cost drivers is in custom synthesis pricing: what drives your quote.

The Copy-Paste RFQ Template

Lift this directly. Fill in what you know, and write “not known” rather than deleting a line — a blank field is ambiguous, but “not known” is information.

CUSTOM SYNTHESIS REQUEST FOR QUOTATION

1. TARGET COMPOUND
   Structure (SMILES):
   Structure (InChI, optional):
   Drawn structure:              [attach image file]
   Chemical name (if known):
   CAS number (if known):
   Salt form required:           free base / specify salt / either acceptable
   Molecular weight (of the form required):

2. STEREOCHEMISTRY
   Defined stereocenters:        e.g. (S) at C-2, (R) at C-5
   Required ee or de:            e.g. minimum 98 percent ee
   Verification method:          chiral HPLC / chiral SFC / supplier proposal
   Racemate acceptable?          yes / no
   Racemic standard chromatogram requested?  yes / no

3. QUANTITY
   Amount required now:
   Acceptable minimum:           smallest useful amount
   Repeat orders expected?       no / possible / confirmed
   Anticipated repeat scale:
   Anticipated repeat timing:

4. PURITY SPECIFICATION
   Purity value:
   Method:                       HPLC area 254 nm / HPLC ELSD / w/w assay vs standard / qNMR / GC area
   Any impurity-specific limits: e.g. single unknown NMT 0.5 percent; residual Pd NMT 10 ppm
   Intended use of material:     one sentence

5. ANALYTICAL PACKAGE
   Tier:                         COA only / COA + 1H NMR + LC-MS / full characterization
   Additional tests required:    residual solvents / Karl Fischer / ICP-OES / DSC / XRD / chiral HPLC
   Retained sample required?     yes / no

6. DOCUMENTATION AND REGULATORY LEVEL
   Level:                        research use / GMP-like documentation / full GMP
   Specific documents required:  batch record summary / method details / MSDS-SDS / TSE-BSE statement
   Change control notification required?  yes / no

7. TIMELINE
   Needed-by date:
   Consequence if it slips:      one sentence
   Is a partial early delivery useful?  yes / no, and how much

8. ROUTE INFORMATION HELD
   Literature or patent references:
   Routes attempted internally, and outcome:
   Known problem steps:
   Preferred or excluded reagents:

9. STARTING MATERIALS AVAILABLE FROM US
   Material, quantity, COA available?

10. HAZARD AND HANDLING
   Known or suspected hazards:
   Containment requirements:
   Air, moisture, or light sensitivity:
   Receiving site restrictions:

11. IP AND CONFIDENTIALITY
   NDA status:                   in place (date) / required before disclosure / not required
   Process IP ownership expectation:
   Publication or patent timing constraints:

12. SHIPPING
   Ship-to country and city:
   Known import constraints:
   Packaging requirements:
   Aliquoting required?          yes / no, into how many portions

13. COMMERCIAL
   Budget range:
   Payment or PO process notes:
   Number of suppliers this RFQ has been sent to:

14. CONTACT
   Technical contact (a chemist who can answer route questions):
   Commercial contact:
   Preferred response format:

The last line of section 13 is optional but honest, and it changes supplier behavior in a useful direction — most will quote more sharply when they know it is competitive, and all of them assume it is anyway.

The Five Questions a Good CRO Will Ask You Back

Even a complete RFQ should generate questions. A supplier who has genuinely put a chemist on your request will come back with something. Here is what good questions look like.

1. “What is the next step this material feeds into?”

The most useful question a supplier can ask, and a strong signal that a chemist read the request rather than a salesperson. Knowing the downstream reaction lets them decide which impurities matter and which will be removed anyway, which can remove a purification step and reduce both cost and timeline.

2. “Is the stated purity method fixed, or can we propose an alternative?”

A supplier who asks this is telling you they have looked at the molecule and formed a view about how it behaves analytically. Sometimes a compound has no chromophore and a UV area percent specification is nearly meaningless on it; sometimes it degrades on a standard reversed-phase column. You want to hear this before manufacture, not on the COA.

3. “Would you accept a slightly different salt or solid form?”

Asked because form drives the final crystallization, which is frequently the hardest and least predictable step. If either form works for you, saying yes can remove a genuine schedule risk.

4. “What is your real constraint — date, cost, or purity?”

Every project has one dominant constraint and two soft ones. A supplier asking this is offering to optimize against the right thing. Answer honestly. If the date is immovable, say so and accept that cost or specification will flex.

5. “How much material do you actually need, at minimum, to make a decision?”

This question distinguishes suppliers who think about your program from those who process orders. Sometimes 200 milligrams unblocks a decision that 10 grams was ordered to support, and the smaller amount can be delivered weeks earlier with the balance following.

What It Means If They Ask Nothing

If a supplier returns a quote with no questions at all, one of two things happened.

Either your RFQ was genuinely complete and answered everything — which is possible, and is the goal of this article — or the quote was generated without a chemist looking at the route. The second case is more common than the first, particularly with fast automated quoting, and it produces numbers that get revised upward once real work begins.

Distinguishing between them takes one email. Ask two questions:

1. “What control strategy do you plan for the stereocenter at C-2?”
2. “Which step do you expect to be yield-limiting, and why?”

A supplier who has scoped the chemistry answers in specifics within a day: a named asymmetric method, a named problematic step, a reason. A supplier who has not answers in generalities about their experience and their quality systems. That is your answer, and it is worth more than the quoted price, because a quote that has not been chemically scoped is not really a quote — it is an opening position. Our chemical supplier qualification checklist covers the rest of the diligence, and how to choose a custom synthesis partner covers the selection decision that surrounds it.

Sending the Same RFQ to Multiple Suppliers

Send an identical document to every supplier. Comparability is the entire point, and it is destroyed by paraphrasing.

Buyers frequently rewrite the request for each recipient, adjusting emphasis based on what they believe each supplier is good at. The result is three quotes for three slightly different scopes, which cannot be compared on price. If one supplier quotes with full characterization because your email to them mentioned a filing, and another quotes COA-only because your email to them did not, the price gap tells you nothing about either supplier.

Normalizing the Quotes You Get Back

Even with an identical RFQ, quotes arrive in different shapes. Build a comparison grid with these rows:

Comparison row	What to extract
Total delivered price	Including analysis, shipping, and any documentation fees
Price per gram at the specified purity	Normalizes across quantity differences
Lead time from PO	Ask for it broken into procurement, chemistry, and analysis
Analytical deliverables	List exactly what is included, not the tier name
Documentation level	Their words, then your interpretation
Route disclosed?	Yes, partially, or no — and whether that matters to you
Questions asked	Count and quality; this is a real signal
Repeat-order pricing	Whether they quoted it unprompted
Failure terms	What happens if the material misses specification

That last row is worth asking about explicitly. A quote that does not address what happens on an out-of-specification batch is incomplete. Reasonable answers include a rework at supplier cost, a credit, or a defined split of the risk. An answer of “that does not happen” is not reassuring.

For a view on how the same RFQ lands differently at different types of supplier, see our honest comparison of ChemContract versus large CDMOs, and the US-based custom synthesis capability map for where domestic capability actually sits by chemistry type.

Common RFQ Mistakes and What They Cost

A short list of failure modes, ranked roughly by how often they appear.

1. Compound name only, no structure. Costs four to ten days in clarification, and risks a quote against the wrong isomer or salt.
2. Purity number with no method. Produces quotes that are not comparable and occasionally material that meets the letter of the specification and not the need.
3. No intended use stated. Produces defensively over-specified quotes.
4. “ASAP” as the timeline. Gets deprioritized precisely because it carries no information.
5. No budget range. Produces an order-of-magnitude scatter across quotes that is pure noise.
6. Failed internal routes withheld. The supplier rediscovers them, on your schedule and your budget.
7. Repeat orders not mentioned. Produces a route that cannot scale and a redevelopment cost later.
8. Different RFQ text to each supplier. Destroys comparability, which was the reason for multi-sourcing.
9. Hazard constraints omitted. Produces a requote after the supplier reads the structure properly.
10. No technical contact named. Every question routes through a procurement inbox and adds a day.

Nine of these ten cost time rather than money directly — but on a program with a fixed clinical or grant milestone, time is the expensive currency.

ChemContract Research has run custom synthesis from milligram to multi-ton since 2000, with in-house analytical services covering HPLC, GC, NMR, LC-MS, ICP-OES, Karl Fischer and chiral HPLC, and contract R&D for route development where no precedent exists. Our synthesis capability includes cryogenic chemistry to −78 °C, high-pressure hydrogenation, flow chemistry, fluorination, and chiral synthesis and resolution, alongside a catalog of over 7,000 compounds. Send us a completed RFQ — or just a structure and a date — and we will return a quote within 24 hours, along with the questions we still need answered. Start here.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the minimum information needed for a custom synthesis quote?

A structure as SMILES or InChI, the quantity in grams or kilograms, a purity specification with the method that will verify it, and a needed-by date. With those four fields a chemist can usually price a route the same day. Everything else in a full RFQ improves accuracy and reduces the chance of a requote after work starts.

Why is a chemical name not enough to quote from?

Names are ambiguous in three ways that change cost. They often omit salt form, so hydrochloride versus free base is unresolved. They frequently omit stereochemistry, and a racemate can be a fraction of the cost of a single enantiomer. They can also hide tautomer and regiochemistry questions. A SMILES string plus a drawn structure resolves all three.

How much does sharing a budget range change the quote I get?

It changes what gets proposed rather than the price of a fixed scope. A chemist who knows your ceiling can tell you within a day whether the target is achievable, propose a lower-purity or smaller-scale option that fits, or decline early. Without a range, suppliers guess, and quotes come back scattered across an order of magnitude for no useful reason.

Does telling the supplier about repeat orders change the route?

Materially. A one-time few-gram order justifies a short linear route using expensive reagents, because total reagent cost is small. A program expecting kilogram repeats justifies spending development time on a route with cheaper inputs, fewer chromatographic purifications, and a step count that survives scale-up. Say which situation you are in.

What analytical package should I request for a research-grade intermediate?

For most discovery-stage intermediates, a certificate of analysis plus proton NMR and LC-MS is sufficient and adds little to the price. Add quantitative NMR or weight-by-weight assay when the material is used to make a standard or dosed in vivo. Reserve full characterization with residual solvents and elemental impurities for material entering regulated work.

What does it mean if a supplier asks no questions about my RFQ?

It usually means one of two things. Either the RFQ was genuinely complete, or the quote was generated without a chemist looking at the route. Ask which stereocenter control strategy they plan to use and what the projected yield-limiting step is. A supplier who has actually scoped the chemistry will answer in specifics; one who has not will answer in generalities.