What sort of prices and run sizes are we talking about?
Let's say I had a board about as complicated as an Arduino Leonardo, and I wanted 10 prototype boards populated. Roughly how much should I expect to spend?
I ended up doing my last 10 boards by hand because the minimum price is too high now, it starts at $141, no matter how few pads you take.
Two years ago I got 20 boards incl. pcb and parts for $120, each had 46 SMD pads to be soldered! 3 cent per pad, 46 pads per board, 20 boards and $30 minimum fee for soldering. $51.60 in parts (20 atmegas, resistors and caps are free), $20 PCBs, $8.40 shipping. That was fantastic!
Does anybody know a cheaper PCBA service? Seeed and itead were not better than Elecrow...
You can get an instant quote from nine different services at PCB Shopper. For a run of 10, you'd be looking at $12-$17 per board for something like the Leonardo. That falls to about $4 per board for a run of 100 and $1 per board for 1000.
Let's say I had a board about as complicated as an Arduino Leonardo, and I wanted 10 prototype boards populated. Roughly how much should I expect to spend?
[1] https://store.arduino.cc/arduino-leonardo-with-headers