Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive.

I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).

> Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business

> When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck.

I’m confused, which one is it?

I assume the growth story isn’t great when you factor in the non-automatable tasks and big capital outlays, so your product leaves that to existing CMs and scales the software stack instead?

Do you see this product as being beneficial to subcontractors (presumably still doing the 90% manual work), or does this legitimately reduce the actual workload/costs at the production level?

This would be incredible for innovation if we can bring this back domestically. It's very hard given lack of raw materials and the supply chain around it often also requires robust network but hopefully this spurs something.

This is something that takes real expertise though, kind of a moonshot for an inexperienced team unfortunately. Would be cool if had mission driven backers otherwise will just end up being hobbyist material. Relying on defense (bubble?) gives at least some breathing room as not actually competing against china for better prices.

I love to see new players in this space! We’ve done a ton of PCBA through Macrofab. My relationship with them goes back far enough to have been a beta customer and I’ve chatted on the phone with the CEO a few times. It’s interesting comparing what you’re offering and what they offer. When I started using them, the fact that you could just upload Eagle or KiCAD files, get an instant quote, and verify MPN/BOM and parts placement online… without having to zip up and email Gerbers was extraordinary. Their lead-time is longer than yours, around 3 weeks, but the pricing has always kinda hit a sweet spot.

I noticed your KiCAD plugin there too. I am super curious to see what your workflow and pricing looks like. There are definitely times when the 7-day turnaround will be a game changer for us.

I guess one gate there: do you ship to Canada? We do have a US branch that could do the export-import for us, but way easier if we don’t have to route it through them as far as end-to-end delivery time goes.

Nice but the USA are not our global friends anymore.

Anything available in the EU?

I work in a building with a board assembly line that sits idle most of the time. They have tried securing outside contract work to fill in the gaps. No takers yet.

The only domestic drivers for board fab and assembly are autmotive and defense. They already have their supply chains running.

> Drone and defense teams get boards back in 7 days

Oh

I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh? Sure it's profitable but there's a reason hardware manufacturing is generally outsourced to the lowest bidder. Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally? Manufacturing hardware (especially if you are not Apple) is generally a capital intensive, low profit margin business that is extremely sensitive to labor costs. The fact that the past two decades of growth in the US is dominated by tech companies is precisely because software and the associated network effects are able to drive disproportionate amount of growth, unlike hardware. The further down the value chain in hardware the more commoditized you are.