Not familiar with the issue, but that has to be $1m minimum order, correct? And you would get a production run in 1-10k. How many revs does that include?

My understanding is that Shenzhen dominance so far is from 3 pillars - low minimum order size, low per-part price, and fast response. They can do that because they have lot of highly trained labor that work mad hours. So to compete you would need to leverage a lot of automation... which would be a lot less flexible and very rocky at the start. Would love to get a correction from someone more familiar with the situation.

Surely you mean $1m per project and not per board, and projects are at a large scale?

> 1 million per piece

Zimbabwean dollars I hope because 1 million usd PER BOARD?

That's a bit of a false dichotomy, as you could pay ~$200 to get them assembled by one of the Chinese PCBA services.

Downside to this: it takes a long time, I have to source the parts myself, and I can't separate design or programming errors from soldering errors. (There will be many of those) I have not figured out a system to So: Having JLC do the assembly is a no-brainer for the projects I've done.