A letter from the shop

Straight talk on carbide pricing.

July 31, 2026 · Effective August 1, 2026

Dear Valued Customer,

You already know what this letter is about, because you’ve been getting the same one from everybody else. Carbide has been climbing steadily since the beginning of 2025 and it hasn’t let up.

Here’s our part of it. Our blank prices jumped again on July 1, by around 50%, and we’ve been eating that increase for a month. We can’t eat it anymore. Starting with new orders on August 1, every solid carbide tool is repriced straight from what it actually costs to make today: material, coating, and grind time. Most of our stock end mills land around 30% higher. A handful of items that had drifted below where they should have been will move more than that.

Three things worth knowing:

1. Your tooling budget is protected where we can protect it. Orders already placed don’t change. Quotes issued before August 1 are good for 30 days. And regrinds and coating aren’t going up a dime. There’s no new carbide in a regrind. If you’re not already sending tools back for reconditioning, now is the time; it’s the single best way to take the sting out of this market.

2. We’re passing along the bad, and that’s all this is. This increase is our material cost moving through to you, nothing more. We’re not using a hot carbide market as cover to fatten our margins.

3. We’ll pass along the good, too. The math works both ways. If carbide comes back down, our prices come back down with it: same calculation, same honesty, opposite direction.

And a little good news to go with it: our stock end mill line is now TisaFlex-coated, so legacy Alcrona and Futura Nano part numbers are 50% off while stock lasts, online only, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. They will not be restocked. When they’re gone, they’re gone. If you run those tools, now is the time to load up.

We appreciate the business, and we don’t take a letter like this lightly.

- Star Tool Inc.

Wichita, KS · sales@startoolusa.com