Breaking down assembly costs

[LukeW]

Let's consider the Arduino Due - it's just an example of a fairly simple typical single-board PCB assembly without any plastics or case etc.

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardDue

What would you say, roughly, in approximate terms, it costs to manufacture? (i.e. PCB cost plus component cost plus assembly cost). How would each of those 3 cost categories break down, as an approximate guess?

What would the assembly cost be, roughly, and how does that assembly cost compare relative to the cost of the components and the cost of the PCB itself?

How much would the economy of scale typically change, going from prototype scale say 10x units, to 100x units, to 1000x units?

[spanner888]

Unfortunately there are more variables that need to be considered, including things like product quality and manufacturing yield.

Quality is impacted by component quality (what supply chain do you anticipate - Aliexpress end or Mouser etc?) as well as manufacturing, not to mention the design and shipping losses and customer returns. Yield is impacted by all of those factors as well as the manufacturers capability and interpretation of what you want. Your design can also increase manufacturing costs if you do not DFM "design for manufacturing" and also design to take full advantage of your manufacturers capabilities. Bunny Huang has several good articles about this.

From your question and "low" quantities, it seems that like me you probably have little manufacturing experience, so I recommend you also look top down pricing - compare Aliexpress & Sparkfun etc online retail prices for the Due and imagine 50% or more markup. See this article[/ [url]https://learn.adafruit.com/how-to-build-a-hardware-startup/pricing-your-producturl] (one of many on the web).

Octopart have several good articles on cost of materials versus quantity as well.

[chicken]

You can play with CircuitHub.
https://circuithub.com

While they are a bit more expensive than Chinese assemblers, the website will give you a good idea of how batch size influences cost.