JLC PCB Prototype Assembly - Incredibly Cheap

[phil from seattle]

They don't eliminate setup costs - there is an engineering fee but it is relatively small and makes small orders economic.

They took a bet that a mostly automated service would be popular. Based on what I can see, they seriously underestimated that. I would not be surprised to see other PCB services (Allpcb, pcbway, seeeeeed,...) jumping in. If anyone ever offers a reasonable set of connectors and other mechanicals, they will be getting my orders.

By the way, they are clearly trying to discourage the really small orders - 5 units or less.  In the last couple of months they appear to have significantly increased the number of components with minimum order numbers and I see a lot more parts with attrition. In the last couple of weeks  I did a proto run for a design and really only needed 3 boards but the cost difference between 3 and 10 was really small (about $1 each for the extra boards) so I had 10 made. Yet, they still limit you to 30 units per assembly job.

[SMTech]

Even with the limitations, the amount of work that went into creating the workflow they have will have been pretty significant and will need to be replicated by anyone who wants to do something similar, does it even make a decent margin... who knows?

[miceuz]

Doh. I tried that. First order they placed wrong resistors. I had 330 ohm and 1M ones, they skipped 1M ones and placed 330R everywhere.
No problem for the second order though...

[c64]

Doh. I tried that. First order they placed wrong resistors. I had 330 ohm and 1M ones, they skipped 1M ones and placed 330R everywhere.

Really... Was it recently?