Small run PCBA recommendations?

[LukeW]

I’m looking for a PCBA house for small-ish jobs. (10-100 units)

Shenzhen is fine. Easy communication and service and good prices are nice.
Nothing too complicated. 2-layer FR-4, boards smaller than 100mm x 100mm, common red/green/blue mask colours, technical rail and panelisation may be added at their discretion, HASL and ENIG, 6/6 rules, 13 thou min drills, single-sided SMD asssembly down to the QFN and 0402 scale. Hopefully they have a few reels of 0.1u in stock 
Any suggestions?

[rea5245]

Check out PCBShopper.com. It's a price comparison site for PCB fabrication and assembly. It also has Amazon-style reviews of many of the companies.

Disclosure: I run the site.

- Bob Alexander
  PCBShopper.com

[mrpackethead]

Check out PCBShopper.com. It's a price comparison site for PCB fabrication and assembly. It also has Amazon-style reviews of many of the companies.

Disclosure: I run the site.

- Bob Alexander
  PCBShopper.com

Pcbshopper might give you some ideas, but treat it like the rest of the internet.  Some company's reviews are excluded, the site accepts advertising revenue from PCB companies.       It is good for giving to you a list of possible companies.   Make sure that you log in directly to the various companies and verifiy the pricing.

[Siwastaja]

Been quite happy with PCBWay, with batch sizes between 30 and 130. Fast and surprisingly clear communication. Some mistakes do happen, but it's not surprising with relatively complex designs. They'll source everything, or in one case, I have supplied them with one BOM item, while they sourced the rest. I haven't spotted any fake parts, but not saying it couldn't happen.

Having heard and seen horror stories of modern Western PCBA quality, I'm not complaining. Completely error-free PCBA is not going to happen without a huge investment on your part. PCBWay has been quite hassle-free and low-cost, even in small batches. But you will need to perform your own quality control and possibly some minor rework, which they will compensate for if you complain. If a major error happens, any PCBA house should fix their error by redoing the boards. Haven't happened to me, yet...

It sounds like your designs would be smaller than mine. So expect around $200-300 initial cost (possibly even less, I don't know) and off you go. But beware - you need to buy excess components for the pick&place because some parts will always be lost in the process (for very small scale, they'll hand place everything, but excess parts are still needed). In very small scale, this can easily lead to 10-20% of extra BOM cost. This is true with any assembly house. If you buy the sourcing service, expect to see a bit of extra price played into the component prices. This is a combination of taxes and tariffs, pick/place excess, and their business model of hiding part of the cost to the component prices, which is kind of understandable - sourcing takes resources as well.

[julianhigginson]

Another vote for pcbway. Have used them a few times over the last year for prototyping. They're fast and cheap and very easy to deal with. Not perfect, unfortunately. (Nobody is) But I definitely recommend them as a very good example of a short run Chinese fab and assemble service.

[janekm]

I've used the Chinese side of PCBWay a number of times with no complaints, I've found them to be very fastidious about ensuring parts are placed correctly. Though it may help being in the same time zone as they'll call in case of any doubts and send pictures to confirm before reflow.
If you're curious, I took a little video of their assembly and part of the PCBM operation some time back:

JLC, probably the biggest prototype PCB factory (recently filmed by strangeparts on YouTube) offer a really interesting service for part assembly of boards with only the components they keep in stock which appears to be highly automated through their website. I don't believe they offer it internationally yet though.

(I have no affiliation with either other than being a customer)