CNF Tool Costs

CNF charges a one-time fee for individuals to participate in the safety training and orientation to become a badged user of the facility. All further trainings, process support and consultations are included in this fee indefinitely. There are fees, however, for daily lab access and for the use of tools.

CNF does not publish a rate sheet for these lab fees, but our User Program managers are eager to assist you, should you wish to estimate a budget for your current or future work. They can advise you based on many years of experience in assisting researchers to attain their research goals. At CNF we assess only a modest daily lab access fee, and then charge for each individual major tool by the usage time as recorded by our lab management software. Each tool has an hourly rate and a minimum usage time that supports the expense to acquire, operate and maintain it. Your rate class depends on whether you are working for an academic institution, government lab, or a company. Our core grant comes from the US National Science Foundation to subsidize access for academic researchers. They require that our fees for services to industry users do not undercut the pricing of similar commercial services. CNF does offer a discount for heavy users of all types, in the form of a “soft cap” that lowers the hourly rates once a dollar threshold is met in a twelve-month period.

Details are in the CNF Lab Manual.

For more information, please contact the User Program

Reviewing Individual Tool Rates

Users and PIs (PIs that are not also users will need to request NEMO access by contacting CNF Computing ) may review the hourly and minimum rates for an individual tool with the following steps:

  1. Login to NEMO
  2. On the main page, click "Tool control"
  3. Use the menu on the left (desktop view) to search for a tool or browse by tool location and then processing area to that tool's main page (tool names for which you are not authorized to use will appear greyed out... they are still clickable)
  4. Under the Tool status click and expand 'Rates'
  5. You will see the tool's rates for the project types on which you are a user (presently, PIs must be assigned as a user on a project)

Reviewing Consumables Rates

Users and PIs (PIs that are not also users will need to request NEMO access by contacting CNF Computing ) may review the hourly and minimum rates for an individual tool with the following steps:

  1. Login to NEMO
  2. On the main page, click "CNF Store Checkout"
  3. You will see the rates for each consumable item, divided up by area
    1. "Runtime Consumables" are at the bottom of the list

 

Billing and Tracking of Charges

Users will be billed in the following month for accumulated CNF charges. For Cornell accounts, this is via a journal voucher. For External accounts, invoices are sent via email to the Account Rep provided by PI. More information on external user billing information can be found here: External Billing

Users and PIs may review current charges in NEMO (in the NEMO main page, go to "Lab Use"). Adjustments to charges may be directly requested in NEMO (Choose "Requests" from the top menu bar) or by contacting the CNF User Program. Users, PIs, and Account Representatives can request Cornell KFS account number changes by emailing CNF Accounting. 

Please note that in support of CNF moving from CORAL to NEMO,  XReporter and CNF WhoIAM reached end of service Jan 1, 2024. CNF Billing is via Quickbooks beginning Feb 1, 2024.