Nothing in the legal terms explicitly prevents your employees from using my designs for other purposes. If you leak my IP and I find out 13 months later, your terms prevent me from seeking damages because you only cover 12 months from manufacturing.

I like that you have an NDA that I can opt in to, but you should be offering the NDA by default when I upload the files. I should not have to go looking for it in your documentation.

Edit: I realize that there is also limited protection and a lot of risk using a Chinese manufacturer. But requiring source files makes it much, much, easier to look at my design, recognize what it's for, and reproduce it, or at least copy the innovative parts of my design.

I won't complain about the price, I understand it's going to be more expensive than China. But it's a tough one for me. I have a budget that I have to work with, and while I have some flexibility 3X prices (your site priced $9k compared to JLC's $2k, even after tariffs and shipping) make the project nonviable for me. I hope you can continue to improve pricing over time as you scale.

Also your parts selection interface needs a lot of work. I have a very simple board and I had to go through clunky search and select for parts, even when the digikey part number was in the description.

A domestic PCB manufacturing pipeline, has been a pipe dream for me an many other Hardware startup EEs for a long time. Until costs are more competitive, CN still gets the business. Hope you can bring costs for small batch prototype PCB manufacturing down further in the future, then you will have our business!

Currently, all assembly is done in house (in the US) but bare PCBs typically are still made in CN. We used to produce everything overseas and just do the QA/test in the US but during the chip shortage I ended up setting up the production line to attempt to eliminate any possible shortages/tariffs.

It is a difficult struggle manufacturing commercial products in the US (doubly so with an openhardware project) since the final cost is the major blocker but I decided it was worth it for many reasons. Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there. I see you are planning to lean heavily on automation/AI for this, will be watching to see how it all progresses.

There are still some major blockers in the US. Commercial/Industrial real estate being a big one. Costs are not going down...even if employee count is minimized.

I wish nothing but the best for the project.

Curious, why are surface mount USB-C connectors not able to be done as part of the surface mount components (treated as a through hole I think)? Too fiddly?

Also, one question to pick your team’s brain: What’s your team’s AI PCB workflow and design tips to work with your production line? Any specific tips for ESP32-related integrations?

"Never put any friction between your customer and giving you money"

Dude, absolutely get rid of the requirement to make an account to get a quote. Understandable(ish) to need one to check-out, but hell "Check-out as guest" was probably one of the most profitable innovations in e-commerce ever.

A longer list of accounts is not worth more than a longer list of orders.

Are you interested in partnerships? I'm running pcbjam.com (web port of KiCad with collab, sharing, git, AI etc.) and I'm looking for a partner to do what EasyEDA is to JLC. Where can I find you?

My feedback: until the moment I click the "order" button, do not require me to log in. If "Checkout As Guest" can possibly be sufficient, at least for the "Grid Proto" tier, then do that.

You have a digital payment instrument for the order regardless of login. That should be sufficient for whatever legal obligations exist, real or imagined, so have the courage to make that policy despite the pushback.

The app feels very vibe-coded, and gives impression it's not well tested and polished for a new user/project.

I appreciate PCBs aren't the usual the consumer-level type of user, but I felt confused by a lot compared to JLCPCB. Hope that helps.

I've run hundreds of low volume orders on conventional lines, it's death by a thousand cuts, tough to describe exactly why until you do it.

I remember documentaries from the 90s/00s showing Chinese factories with people hand soldering stuff onto PCBs, but most components used in electronics seems way too small for that.

Buried vias are /super/ expensive from any board house- and very uncommon in most prototyping designs as a result.

Obviously a bit different if you're doing boards with super dense BGA layout chips, but even then you can usually avoid it.

I'd imagine that just because they've decided it's good enough to go public with it, doesn't mean it's done getting better. Or that someone else can't do it better, now that it's been shown to work.

I’m guessing that’s supposed to be 8th and 17th, or 18th and 27th?

While logistics and delivery (both inbound parts and outbound product) are a key factor, time and cost don't map linearly to distance. Rather than being exactly central, the optimal solve is often somewhat geographically central but leverages proximity to transport corridors, ports and other factors such as weather variability.

KCI isn't a central air hub and winter weather can disrupt flow. Being further south near an East-West hub like DFW can be better (or Houston if an Atlantic port is valuable). Or if bidirectional delivery is everything, base near a Super-Hub like Memphis (Fedex) or UPS WorldPort (Louisville, KY) and go all-in on reaching lower rate tiers with one preferred domestic delivery partner.

For high-automation physical plants, scale can tend to chunk into increments beyond which 'one double-size plant' isn't meaningfully cheaper than two 'single-size' plants. Then an optimal build-out end game can be East and West plants that are each one air-hop from all major metros on that coast and a one-day truck/rail hop from 50% of customers on that coast. If it's a rapid-turn tech product, Reno can work well - half-day road trip from bay area for outbound and a Pacific port for inbound (Stockton). I don't know the quick-turn PCB assembly biz but maybe basing across the street from Digi-Key's biggest distribution center is a 'checkmate' move that beats all other advantages?

Logistics strategy is fun!

80% of the US population lives east of the 100th meridian, which bisects Kansas.

It's probably not best to optimize for the lowest maximum ship time in the lower 48, but something more weighted for population. Lowest average transit time. I would have guessed something like Nashville, TN. Claude is telling me Nashville is up there but Dayton, OH is the best. 14% <= 1 day, 46% reached in <= 2 days and 74% reached in <= 3 days. 2.83 average.

Compared to Kansas City, KS at 5%, 25%, 61%. 3.11 average.

This fab is in South Deerfield, MA which is 15%, 26%, 52%, 3.32 avg.

I guess population is also technically not the best measure. It would be better to measure the potential customers. Which is interesting because those are going to be skewed towards the coasts to some degree.

Maybe your Kansas suggestion is more correct than I thought. I'd still wager its more like the midwest than the plains though.

That's never been true (at least since the first chips or components). A lot of my Shenzhen orders have to wait on international airfreight on US-made chips because the ones I spec'd (basically the only ones that would do the job) are US-manufactured and warehoused.

Recommend you look at a world map of Intel fabs. Or Micron Fabs.

Basically anything aerospace and defense related will care more about speed and compliance than cost.