How do you work out how to price a product you make?

I still have ex-clients call me and offer me obscene amounts per hour to install new features to programs I did for them.

***¡NO!***

Besides Social security would just deduct my earnings from my next payment, there is no motivation and after being independent for 12 years I am totally burnt out on programming.
I built web sites for a while, but I had to get out of that business because it just never ends. Fortunately I had a partner that was willing to take on the extra work, so I didn't leave any of my clients hanging. I loved writing the initial code, but constantly updating code that you've already written gets old after a while.
 
I built web sites for a while, but I had to get out of that business because it just never ends. Fortunately I had a partner that was willing to take on the extra work, so I didn't leave any of my clients hanging. I loved writing the initial code, but constantly updating code that you've already written gets old after a while.
I am an expert in small to large manufacturing, distribution, and everything from customer service, inventory control, order processing, warehouse management, interfacing different systems, migrating systems. You name it, I've done it. Accounting to Forecasting to utilities for programmers.

It makes me want to puke.

The complexity of these tasks is what makes my programming so desirable, the actually programming isn't all that hard, especially since I was working in a multivalue Unidata/Pick environment where the file systems are self configuring. Need a new field? Give it a name, make a dictionary entry, and it's working. No juggling file systems at midnight on a Friday night when everyone else is asleep.

Bill Gates back in the 90's called it the most advanced language and database in existence, and even his XML isn't as good and it was made to mimic unidata!!!

I'm 68, I want to garden, make good meals, take it easy. Enjoy every day to it's fullest. When you program in $#!+ this complex you never have any time off. It's like that song you can't get out of your head but it's programming.

Nope nope nope nope nope! NO MORE!
 
I took just enough programming courses to determine that I liked it, I could get pretty good, but crucially, I didn't want to make a career out of it. As you said, I couldn't get it out of my head when it was time to chill out. It's full of logic problems that I couldn't just leave on the desk at work, they hitched a ride home with my brain. No thanks. Terrible job for someone with OCD (I do have a relatively moderate case).
 
^Yup, pedals are (usually) quite labo(u)r intensive to put together. Hardly a good business plan if you happen to be in a high income country. The one pedal I made into a product, I bent over backwards at the design stage to minimize the need for internal wiring (big time sink) and to make it as easy to assemble as possible. It sold well, for a good price, yet I'm still not ready to make another commercial pedal.
productizing is an art form. I'm starting a brewery and we've had to standardize the process for of course the beer, but actually more important has been figuring out the food since we came up with our own recipes from basically scratch and have had to make them reproducible and work within a commercial kitchen.

I think about it constantly with pedals. I have a couple design ideas, but till I put in the time to learn to do the PCB layouts I'll be smash multiple PCBs in an enclosure and messing with combo pedals.
 
I am an expert in small to large manufacturing, distribution, and everything from customer service, inventory control, order processing, warehouse management, interfacing different systems, migrating systems. You name it, I've done it. Accounting to Forecasting to utilities for programmers.

It makes me want to puke.

The complexity of these tasks is what makes my programming so desirable, the actually programming isn't all that hard, especially since I was working in a multivalue Unidata/Pick environment where the file systems are self configuring. Need a new field? Give it a name, make a dictionary entry, and it's working. No juggling file systems at midnight on a Friday night when everyone else is asleep.

Bill Gates back in the 90's called it the most advanced language and database in existence, and even his XML isn't as good and it was made to mimic unidata!!!

I'm 68, I want to garden, make good meals, take it easy. Enjoy every day to it's fullest. When you program in $#!+ this complex you never have any time off. It's like that song you can't get out of your head but it's programming.

Nope nope nope nope nope! NO MORE!
You would not believe how I can relate to almost that whole post... except I'm still far from retirement.
 
productizing is an art form. [...] I think about it constantly with pedals.

You put a word in my head that wasn't there before. Productizing. In hindsight, this is what I must have done with my Rock Mania pedal. I hated the idea of assembling it so much that I made it easy enough that even grumpy me can put it together without cursing my life.

You also inspired me to condense my old, 7-minute disassembly/reassembly YouTube video into an Instagram reel that even the short attention span crowd can digest:


Thanks for the inspiration, @airbud. It was more fun than actually doing what I was supposed to be doing at the moment :)
 
i just hear my Dad saying, “well what can you get people to pay?” That’s your price
That's my approach for the most part.

When you're starting out and trying to get into the market/build a customer base, it's a good idea to price things low enough that people will buy them out of curiosity. Don't lose money, but consider the first few batches of units sold part of a marketing campaign and accept that as a cost of doing business. When people have had a chance to try them out and decide that they like them, they'll (hopefully) determine that the pedals are a "great deal for the price" and the demand will start to go up as word gets out, and you can slowly raise prices.

One way a friend of mine did this was every time he released a new product he would list the price he wanted to sell it at eventually then "put it on sale" for 25% off or so for the first few months until interest starts in.

It's important to know how much the components of each unit costs and how much time it takes to put together and you can use that as a metric to determine if something is worthwhile, but it can be a balancing act. If there's a pedal that takes $80 of parts and takes 3 hours to build but customers can buy a competing alternative for $150, you're going to have a hard time making that pedal make sense. You can also use this to figure out if there are ways to cut costs or cut labor times. All of my "production" pedals use pick-and-place assembled SMD boards, which is obviously a HUGE time savings. At my peak of hand-assembly I could place components for my most popular pedal in about 15 minutes, but as I've gotten more experienced I value my time more. It only costs me about $4-5 extra per board (with large-ish quantities of course) to get them assembled, and I consider 15 minutes of my time to be worth far more than $5.

As an example, a common pedal I make requires about $40 in components, and I've gotten to the point that if I'm focused and not distracted, I can build one in under 20 minutes. I sell this pedal for $180. Am I charging $420 per hour for my labor? Not really, because I have to cover things like my electricity bill to keep the lights on and machines running, I have to cover the time it takes to box up and ship the pedal as well as the packaging materials, I have to cover the time it takes for me to go to the post office every day to drop things off. I also spend a lot of time answering emails and responding on forums and social media to keep customers happy and get potential customers interested, and I'm never going to get paid directly for that.

Also, I can build a pedal in less than 20 minutes, but guess how many hundreds of hours I spent practicing to get to that point? There's also the point that I spent time designing the circuit board, but also I spent years of work and thousands of dollars in wasted materials getting to the level of proficiency that allows me to design circuit boards that work as well as they do.

This answer got a lot longer than I originally planned, but the summary is: you need to price the product where a consumer will consider it worthwhile, but don't undervalue your time and your skills. If you're at the level where you can build something worthy of being sold, you have skills that most don't, and that's worth something.
 
^ I couldn't agree more with your post. It's funny how it somehow ends up agreeing with my far-more-experienced friend's rule-of-thumb: selling at about 5x the cost of ingredients seems to end up covering design/assembly/customer service/various other expenses while leaving a decent profit margin.
 
That's my approach for the most part.

When you're starting out and trying to get into the market/build a customer base, it's a good idea to price things low enough that people will buy them out of curiosity. Don't lose money, but consider the first few batches of units sold part of a marketing campaign and accept that as a cost of doing business. When people have had a chance to try them out and decide that they like them, they'll (hopefully) determine that the pedals are a "great deal for the price" and the demand will start to go up as word gets out, and you can slowly raise prices.

One way a friend of mine did this was every time he released a new product he would list the price he wanted to sell it at eventually then "put it on sale" for 25% off or so for the first few months until interest starts in.

It's important to know how much the components of each unit costs and how much time it takes to put together and you can use that as a metric to determine if something is worthwhile, but it can be a balancing act. If there's a pedal that takes $80 of parts and takes 3 hours to build but customers can buy a competing alternative for $150, you're going to have a hard time making that pedal make sense. You can also use this to figure out if there are ways to cut costs or cut labor times. All of my "production" pedals use pick-and-place assembled SMD boards, which is obviously a HUGE time savings. At my peak of hand-assembly I could place components for my most popular pedal in about 15 minutes, but as I've gotten more experienced I value my time more. It only costs me about $4-5 extra per board (with large-ish quantities of course) to get them assembled, and I consider 15 minutes of my time to be worth far more than $5.

As an example, a common pedal I make requires about $40 in components, and I've gotten to the point that if I'm focused and not distracted, I can build one in under 20 minutes. I sell this pedal for $180. Am I charging $420 per hour for my labor? Not really, because I have to cover things like my electricity bill to keep the lights on and machines running, I have to cover the time it takes to box up and ship the pedal as well as the packaging materials, I have to cover the time it takes for me to go to the post office every day to drop things off. I also spend a lot of time answering emails and responding on forums and social media to keep customers happy and get potential customers interested, and I'm never going to get paid directly for that.

Also, I can build a pedal in less than 20 minutes, but guess how many hundreds of hours I spent practicing to get to that point? There's also the point that I spent time designing the circuit board, but also I spent years of work and thousands of dollars in wasted materials getting to the level of proficiency that allows me to design circuit boards that work as well as they do.

This answer got a lot longer than I originally planned, but the summary is: you need to price the product where a consumer will consider it worthwhile, but don't undervalue your time and your skills. If you're at the level where you can build something worthy of being sold, you have skills that most don't, and that's worth something.
You touch on a good topic- “burdened labor rate” vs pay rate. I was “fortunate” enough to see the inner workings of how an ERP system handles labor. The factor they base on is called “burdened labor”, which is on average 5x or more higher than actual paid labor rates to the employees, which covers all of the overheard (this is for a “repair shop” so to speak, so there is no R&D costs added in). Also disclaimer: the numbers I’m going to throw out were for over 10yrs ago, so may be slightly different.

A shop doing repairs on electrical equipment, had 3 salary banded employees- the lowest making $15/hr, the highest $30.. so for conversation we will use the median band of $20. The employee may get paid $20/hr, but the burdened labor rate was around $100. The employee then works where he gets paid overtime (1.5x), so he makes $30/hr, but the burdened rate goes up to $110/hr, and if he gets double time, the rate goes up to $120/hr - so even though the salary doubles, the cost to the company doesn’t (overhead doesn’t care if it’s straight time or double).

Those who do this for a livelihood get it, but it’s hard to explain to those who don’t understand when they think they can build most pedals/guitars/amps/widgets soooo much cheaper than buying, they are not accounting for their time correctly. Sure, that “$99 pedal” you see at Sweetwater seems high for “$20 worth of parts”, but if it takes you 3 hours to order parts, paint and drill enclosure, build the pedal, troubleshoot/test it etc, you definitely aren’t saving anything.

Edit: ever notice how everyone always seems to blame the “greedy manufacturer” for product price, but never the distributor (who adds cost to what the mfr charges, so they can cover their overhead and make a little profit), and also never blame the retailer (who buys the already marked up product from the distributor, and marks it up further)? Want to see a good example of how much each link in the “food chain” mark up the product- look at how much Marshall just cut prices on most of their goods, simply by cutting ONE link in their distribution chain!
 
Last edited:
One way a friend of mine did this was every time he released a new product he would list the price he wanted to sell it at eventually then "put it on sale" for 25% off or so for the first few months until interest starts in.
This is basically how I've been approaching it. Building is mainly just a fun hobby for me, but I'm also not opposed to selling the pedals I make since I don't need to have all of them laying around. In my mind, if someone wants to buy a pedal I've built then why not? I'll post the pedals I make on Reverb/instagram for a price that I'd like to sell them at. If they're still in my shop after like 3-4 months then I'll bring it down a bit. I'd rather not undercut myself right off the bat. If someone sees the value in what I'm selling, then they'll be ok with spending their money on it.

I think it also really depends on what you're selling too. I've had some builds that were sold within an hour of me posting them, while others don't really gain any traction or attention.
 
You put a word in my head that wasn't there before. Productizing. In hindsight, this is what I must have done with my Rock Mania pedal. I hated the idea of assembling it so much that I made it easy enough that even grumpy me can put it together without cursing my life.

You also inspired me to condense my old, 7-minute disassembly/reassembly YouTube video into an Instagram reel that even the short attention span crowd can digest:


Thanks for the inspiration, @airbud. It was more fun than actually doing what I was supposed to be doing at the moment :)
i am THRILLED to hear this!!!! that pedal looks fucking incredible, something for me to aspire to! i used to work in UI/UX and i'm enamored with the graphics choices, extremely usable and great use of color. creating a usable interface for that much complexity is truly an accomplishment, never mind the circuit design itself!

i haven't put the time in to learn pcb layouts yet (beyond a couple basic kicad tutorials), but i'm very excited for the day to open up preassembled boards i designed (probably not original circuits, but you get the idea). color me inspired by you sharing your video! 🤘:love:
 
cost of parts, cost of shipping and 30 dollars per hour of build time. Don't sell yourself short and sell to people who value your time AND talent. Trashy builds are dime a dozen and if someone says they can get something similar elsewhere I tell them to buy that. I don't work for free at my day job and I don't sell pedals I make for just the cost of parts. Your time is worth something and people should value that, if they don't then you don't want them as a customer.
 
I charge Cost + $25 + Gratuity. My target market are friends and acquaintances.

I'm transparent on cost to them. I tell them I'm happy with C+25 but if you thinks it's worth more to you feel free to tip.

I build for myself but if I can move some, that is my 'business model'.
 
cost of parts, cost of shipping and 30 dollars per hour of build time. Don't sell yourself short and sell to people who value your time AND talent. Trashy builds are dime a dozen and if someone says they can get something similar elsewhere I tell them to buy that. I don't work for free at my day job and I don't sell pedals I make for just the cost of parts. Your time is worth something and people should value that, if they don't then you don't want them as a customer.
Honestly the hardest thing for me was really getting a handle on how long it takes me to make a pedal. I finally started keeping a log including every step and pretty much keeping it like a time clock so I could do the calculations. It also helped me to understand what economies of scale I got by batching pedals of the same or similar types.
 
"It doesn't matter how long it took me to build it, how long would it take you to build it?"
This is why I quit selling. No matter how well a build is executed and how fairly you price it there is always that asshole who reminds you it's only 30 dollars in parts. Im like ok, you build it then 😂. Plus, even if you undercut yourself, there is no shortage of hot garbage builds in blank enclosures built on your pcbs Robert that will sell for 10 dollars less than my rock bottom price. There is a whole sea of pedalpcb builds out there selling for what looks like just parts. How they making any money 🤡
 
I made pedals for family and friends. At first I said “Oh just give me $60”. But no one ever gave me less than $100.

I couldn’t justify charging my brother. He offered to pay, but I just gave it to him.

Right now I’d rather give them away than do a commission and charge. I’ve been skilling up on artwork- I’d want to have that down before I consider selling any more.
 
This is why I quit selling. No matter how well a build is executed and how fairly you price it there is always that asshole who reminds you it's only 30 dollars in parts. Im like ok, you build it then 😂. Plus, even if you undercut yourself, there is no shortage of hot garbage builds in blank enclosures built on your pcbs Robert that will sell for 10 dollars less than my rock bottom price. There is a whole sea of pedalpcb builds out there selling for what looks like just parts. How they making any money 🤡
Look dude, had you put the imaginary money into an imaginary hole in the ground, fucked off for a while and came back to a compete pedal: THEN you'd get respect.

But whats this nonsense you speak of? This so-called "skilled labor"? Please. If you're so smart, why havent you put that money towards something productive like parasitically sucking the wealth out of the labor of thousands of employees like a malignant lump made wholly of hunger and greed?

Here. Hold this Molotov cocktail for me.
 
Back
Top