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How a team from the investment sector turned buying a cold room from a project into a product you can configure online.
Frostbox was created by a team from the investment sector. Day to day we work with large volumes of data, with automation and with advanced AI-based systems. For us artificial intelligence was never a marketing add-on — from the outset it was one of the tools we used to put data in order, to build dependencies and to automate processes.
We came into refrigeration a little differently from most companies.
We did not start from a product catalogue. We started from a question: why does pricing a cold room still take so many manual steps, when most of the dependencies can be described mathematically?
That question was the beginning of Frostbox.
A cold room is usually sold as an individual project, although in reality it is largely a modular system.
The customer gives the dimensions and the temperature. The salesperson gathers the information. Then somebody checks the available variants, selects the panels, works out where a door can be seated, calculates the volume, picks a suitable unit and prepares a quote.
Changing a single parameter often means doing part of that work all over again.
There are 37,898,628 possible combinations alone — width, depth, height, panel thickness, door position, and on top of that the choice of unit. That is 272,652 variants of the room itself multiplied by the 139 units in our catalogue.
Each of them has its own specification and its own price. The configurator picks out the one that actually fits.
No person can hold all of those combinations in their head.
A system can.
It only has to be taught all the rules first.
In the configurator, even a seemingly small change sets off a whole chain of dependencies.
Shifting the width of the room by 200 mm changes the wall division. Panels are available in widths of 400, 600, 800, 1000 and 1200 mm and are set on a 200 mm raster.
The options for seating the door change as well. A 700 mm door requires a suitable 1000 mm panel, and a 900 mm door a 1200 mm one. Their position must at the same time match the actual division of the structure.
A change of dimension also affects the volume. And the volume, together with the required temperature, affects the choice of refrigeration unit. The system analyses several conditions at once and checks one thing above all: whether that particular unit really can hold the required temperature in that particular room.
Cold rooms work between 0 and +10 °C, freezer rooms between −22 and −18 °C.
So it is not only the structure that changes. The unit changes too, and so does the price and the technical documentation.
And the configurator recalculates all of it automatically on every change of parameters.
That is why we do not simply call it a price calculator. It is a tool that reproduces the real process of configuring a cold room.
A change to a single parameter forces every other value to be recalculated — the panel layout, the door seating, the volume, the unit and the price.
Building the final version of the Frostbox configurator took us over two years.
What took the most time was not writing the application itself. The hardest part was gathering the data, putting it in order and translating technical knowledge into thousands of rules the system is able to interpret on its own.
We had to build the dependencies between dimensions, panels, doors, temperature, volume, units and prices.
In that process we drew on our experience in building advanced systems and on AI tools, which helped us analyse and organise a large body of data.
AI did not replace technical knowledge here.
It helped us translate that knowledge into a system.
We were building a solution for which we had no ready template. In many places we had to work out for ourselves how an online cold room configurator ought to behave.
So we made mistakes along the way.
The first dimension grid theoretically allowed 280 combinations of width and depth. Only practice showed that the catalogue holds 189 valid variants — among other things because the depth of a room cannot be smaller than its width.
Some configurations therefore led to variants that could not actually be ordered.
We rebuilt the system.
The first version of unit matching, in turn, could qualify a device on the basis of its product category even though its actual working range said otherwise. It turned out that some units labelled in the data as freezer units worked between −5 and +10 °C.
From that moment the system stopped trusting the label alone.
It checks the device's real working parameters.
There were hundreds of situations like that. Every next version of the configurator was more accurate than the one before.
And that is exactly why building it took over two years.
One of the decisions we are happiest with was our rule on pricing.
If the system is not certain that the price shown in the configurator will match the price of the order, it does not try to guess it.
Instead, a message appears: “Price on request”.
We would rather not show a price for a few seconds longer than show the customer an amount they will not see in their order later.
The configurator is there to make buying simpler.
It must not take away its credibility.
The price shown in the configurator is the net price of the room in the chosen configuration and covers the panels, the door and the floor, if one was selected.
The unit is shown as a separate item. That is deliberate — several devices differing in parameters and in price may suit the same room.
For a two-section room the configuration consists of two catalogue products, and the system shows them separately in the summary.
Delivery within Poland is included in the price.
One of the greatest advantages of a modular system is the way it is assembled.
A small room of about 1 × 1 m may consist of just a few panels. A 2 × 2 m structure has a dozen or so. Even a larger storage room remains a set of precisely prepared elements joined together according to the documentation.
That is why assembling a standard room looks different from what many people imagine.
Two people can put together a small or medium room with a monoblock in about four hours, provided the site has been properly prepared beforehand and the ground is level.
Larger structures and two-section rooms require correspondingly more time. The refrigeration unit is started once all the work is complete and in line with the requirements of the sealing materials used.
In the case of a wall or ceiling monoblock, the refrigeration circuit is factory-sealed and factory-charged. There is no need to interfere with the refrigerant circuit on site.
The range also includes split kits with a factory-prepared and factory-charged line with quick connectors, 2.5, 5 or 10 metres long.
Standard split systems, and installations requiring greater distances, are fitted by a certified specialist.
At present 75 of the 139 units in our range are solutions with a ready-made line. The configurator states which method of assembly applies to the selected device.
We have been developing Frostbox since 2024.
First came the data. Then the rules. Then the dependencies between them. Only on that basis could we build a tool, which we rebuilt and refined many times along the way.
Today the result of that work can be seen in a few minutes.
You choose the parameters of the room. The system checks the possible configurations, selects the components, calculates the price and prepares the documentation.
A process that used to require an exchange of messages, phone calls and manual calculations can, in a standard configuration, end with a price and ready documentation in about two minutes.
After delivery, a standard structure can be assembled in as little as about four hours.
That is exactly what we set out to achieve.
We do not want buying a cold room to start with a phone call asking “how much will this cost?” and then mean several days of waiting for a quote.
We want the customer to be able to start from the dimensions, make a few choices and see straight away what they can actually buy.
We want to turn a cold room from a small investment project into a product you can configure, order and assemble.
Rather in the way modular systems changed how furniture is bought.
We keep all the technical complexity on our side.
What is left on yours should be a simple choice.
See how it works.
Open the configurator →