Nope. Whole tread about it
Boutique Pedal Manufacturers Are Feeling the Tariff Pinch
- Thread starter Chuck D. Bones
- Start date
Passinwind
Well-known member
Are you populating and soldering yourself, or do you have someone else do it?
Passinwind
Well-known member
I use mostly relatively larger format SMD parts and do all building myself, without magnification. My only repetitive builds are onboard preamps and/or EQ pedals, pretty much everything else is a one-off. This would be about my most tedious current board to build up, lots of 0805 parts:
That board measures 1.75 x 1", so three boards for $8.70 shipped. The majority of my other ones run less than ten bucks for three. When I do larger format tube stuff I prefer thicker boards and copper, but I never need or want five and consider that minimum for JLC to be a downside. I have dozens of coasters from JLC collecting dust, it's a bit of a drag. Not their fault though, just an inevitable consequence of lots of prototyping, rarely breadboarding, and pushing the envelope on design and layout a lot.
I just placed my biggest (in terms of dollars spent) order at JLC, and even though the tariffs aren't 100%, the net effect is that my order cost was literally doubled due to an avalanche of extra costs.
It looks like the cheap shipping option, the "Global Standard Direct Line" is only available when the merchandise total is $59 or less. And the merchandise cost used is pre-coupon. So it's easy to stay under $59 for things like bare, HASL-finished, two-sided PCBs. But it's really hard to stay under that amount if doing PCB Assembly. The PCBA service alone has a $25 flat fee, and ENIG finish adds another $16 or so. Throw in a few extended parts with the $3 feeder fee per, and it's practically impossible to stay under $59 for PCBA.
Going over $59 requires shipping by one of the major carriers (DHL, UPS, FedEx), which is $30-50 even for a small order. Then the tariffs, plus additional carrier fees for their added overhead. Plus sales tax. In my case, all these extras literally doubled my cost (actually slightly more than doubled).
If I was doing this as a business, I don't know how I couldn't pass the costs on to customers, unless I had enormous margins.
It looks like the cheap shipping option, the "Global Standard Direct Line" is only available when the merchandise total is $59 or less. And the merchandise cost used is pre-coupon. So it's easy to stay under $59 for things like bare, HASL-finished, two-sided PCBs. But it's really hard to stay under that amount if doing PCB Assembly. The PCBA service alone has a $25 flat fee, and ENIG finish adds another $16 or so. Throw in a few extended parts with the $3 feeder fee per, and it's practically impossible to stay under $59 for PCBA.
Going over $59 requires shipping by one of the major carriers (DHL, UPS, FedEx), which is $30-50 even for a small order. Then the tariffs, plus additional carrier fees for their added overhead. Plus sales tax. In my case, all these extras literally doubled my cost (actually slightly more than doubled).
If I was doing this as a business, I don't know how I couldn't pass the costs on to customers, unless I had enormous margins.
vigilante398
Authorized Vendor
The $25 fee is only for standard assembly, not for economy. Also I've never felt like ENIG was important enough to pay the extra cost for, but that could just be me being cheap. I have a PCBA file in my cart right now that's $21.24 for qty 25 because it's a moderately small, 2-layer green PCB with only "basic" components and economy assembly.
That being said I almost never order just one thing at a time, so this order will surely get way above $59.
Chuck D. Bones
Circuit Wizard
Is there an economy of scale with bulk orders? I'm mainly interested in bare thru-hole boards.
Big Monk
Well-known member
Quote the opposite at this point. More weight really jacks up the shipping.
In my opinion, multiple orders under the “slow boat” threshold end up being cheaper.
Yeah, put another way: the "scale" is the $59 threshold. Cram as much as you can into an order, but keep it under $59 so the cheap shipping option remains available.
Cheap shipping is just that: cheap (ironically cheaper than comparable domestic shipments).
Past $59 and cheap shipping is no longer an option, and with that comes all kinds of extra fees that effectively doubles (or more) the total order cost.
Edit: I haven't tested this, but I'm 99.9% sure that 10 separate $59 orders (all with cheap shipping) will be cheaper - much cheaper - than a single $590 order where you have to use expensive shipping and nonsense fees. Just guessing here, but I'd expect the 10 separate orders to total around $700, while the single $590 order will likely be over $1200.
It's anti-economies of scale.
Last edited:
Big Monk
Well-known member
My experience as well. I just had about $79 worth of boards.
I split it into two orders and the shipping was about $20. Had I ordered one big order, shipping tripled.