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Comment by seddona

2 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?

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!

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.

> 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).