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points by Teknomadix 3 days ago | 0 comments

The site quotes prices for ≥4 layer board production are on the order of 10x JLCPCB. I can pay for DHL overnight from JLC and still come in from uploading my design to holding it in my hand ~7 business days or less.

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!

[–] seddona 3 days ago

Thanks for the feedback. For 5 units of 2 or 4 layer turnkey assembled boards, so long as you fit in the Grid Proto spec it's a little bit more expensive (not 10x, more like 1.3x) and much faster - we have benchmarked this quite a bit. 7 days to the US with any consistency is not possible, we have a lot of data points on that, median is about 10 days. To other countries it might be faster?

[–] beala 1 day ago

I'm very confused by the 1.3x number.

I just had a board (PCB only, no PCB Assembly) made at JLCPCB for $62.91. That's 10 bare boards and a stencil, including shipping and tarrifs. This is a fairly simple 4 layer board, 50mm x 50mm.

I uploaded the same project to your site and I'm getting a quote for $620.26. That's after marking everything as DNP, so it's also just a bare board. No stencil I guess.

To be fair, the JLC board took two-ish weeks to get here. But even with the fastest JLC option (2-3 days) and fast shipping (2-4 days), I don't see how $620.26 is competitive. Am I misunderstanding?

Update: And holy moly. I just noticed the $620 quote is for "any origin", and if I want "USA only" it's $1,697.00!

[–] ggurface 1 day ago

This aligns with the difference I saw when comparing the two as well.

[–] ajw287 1 day ago

If you are doing pool pcb manufacture - think about getting your design rules as a template in KiCAD (you could talk to KiCAD services corporation about how to do that) or Altium. This would help people designing to avoid getting to a finished pcb then discovering that you have a rule about no route through pads or whatever.

[–] ac29 1 day ago

> For 5 units of 2 or 4 layer turnkey assembled boards, so long as you fit in the Grid Proto spec it's a little bit more expensive (not 10x, more like 1.3x)

Does that include the cost of parts? One of the issues I had with sourcing prototype PCBA's in the US is parts are much more expensive (not 10x, but also not 1.3x).

[–] seddona 1 day ago

Yep that includes parts.