- Good luck! One valuable differentiation you could provide is a line of credit. If you can’t win on price, you can help your customers win on cash-conversion cycle.
I’ve been making hardware for 20 years. My highest-volume product was Flybrix, a LEGO drone kit manufactured by Seeed and UniPrecision in China and by Sparqtron in Fremont, California. I’d be happy to work with you on a v2 reboot: Flybrix Swarmz, because every American high school needs a drone swarm.
Beyond that, I’ve worked with many domestic suppliers and built ITAR-controlled products as well. Even without owning the production capacity, if you can offer Net 90 on fabrication and extend credit for components--beyond existing DigiKey, Arrow, Mouser, and vendor credit lines--then I can build products and get paid without putting all the capital at risk upfront.
Factoring is expensive, especially against a purchase order rather than an invoice, and I don’t know of anyone offering working-capital credit based solely on an SBIR award.
Credit is what makes the spice flow.
- Wow. Sounds like a super interesting product. Hadn't considered lines of credit yet, but definitely would be valuable to some higher ticket customers.
- We currently use a small US contract manufacturer that works pretty much as you say. The turn times are terrible (7+ weeks, not 7 days), and this is a major issue, but there are exactly two reasons we continue to use them:
1. Line of credit - we are not billed until we take delivery of tested product. 2. Willingness to handle high mix, low volume products. One product line example: a dozen SKUs with 95-98% parts in common on 2 PCBs, a single set of parts (that we aren't billed for up front) and quoting to build 20 of SKU 1, 50 of SKU 2, 10 of SKU 3, etc. without charging 2-3x the price.
We manufacture in the research / test equipment / defense space and I've heard similar things from other small hardware companies that are like us.
- Ok, fair points. 2. is our focus right now and then we may add 1. over time.
- Sad to see the Lego drone sold out, hope you get that reboot going!
- I hope you guys are successful because I would love to see more US options in this space. Realistically, you can get boards in 7 days from China, and competing with them on price seems like a challenge. So that leaves ITAR and people who need boards even faster. Sounds like that’s where you’re focusing your energy already. What pick and place are you using now that you’ve moved on from the Neoden world?
- Yes that's where we're putting our energy right now. We do most of our assembly with CMs now, but looking at Juki when we open our facility.
- Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive.
I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).
- Think of this service basically for the same purpose as why Crye pants and stuff are manufactured domestically in the USA. But applied to circuit boards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment
More specifically there are a number of new wide-spanning bans on import of mainland china made drone components such as flight controller boards, ESCs, power distribution boards, motors.
The definition of "Blue UAS" pre-dates recent more aggressive changes made by the current US executive branch of the government, but is still relevant:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=blue+UAS+...
- This is exactly our initial market. We realized you can't beat China for a long time, so what do you do in that time? Service demand where you have a structural advantage.
- Can I ask if you are working with any established US defense-oriented electronics firms that go further up the supply chain in auditing/documenting sources and chain of custody of components and the whole BOM? Having US made circuit boards is great but if a certain model of microcontroller only comes from one or two sources and they're in mainland CN, that's a known caveat that has to be documented somewhere... Or if the same product is available at a higher price from a different location. That sort of thing.
One example I could offer is APD, the ESC manufacturer in Australia. They sell ESCs used both in the commercial cinema/filming industry (big quads and coaxial octos carrying RED Komodo size cameras), but also for defense...
- Haven't yet worked with them, but that is one of our goals. We produce documentation to trace all components up the supply chain. In cases where the part is truly only available in CN, we clearly state this.
- I'll hijack this point to talk about robotics - I think we agree 1) It's not ideal for China to control production for _all_ of the things we use here.
2) What they already are good at they'll continue to improve at, because of domain knowledge & ecosystem
3) The reason they are ahead in the first place is labor cost & the QOL workers will tolerate (and intentional government investment)
4) The only way around this is for the US to invest into robotics (labor) & subsidize american manufacturing (ecosystem)
- > The reason they are ahead in the first place is labor cost & the QOL workers will tolerate
That hasn't been accurate in a decade. Chinese labor costs have been higher than Mexico since before Covid. They have more efficient firms, business processes and so much more. The parenthesized "(and intentional government investment)" is related to how they developed nimbler systems, but ignores the totality of industrial policy.
- In this case specifically they also have a huge amount of automation and process learnings from being around for 20+ years.
- Agreed completely. The recent bans are one way of doing this but not the most sustainable long term at all.
We have two options, give up and allow China to control all production, or start the hard battle to improve manufacturing here.
- I totally agree that we need to reinvigorate manufacturing in the US and that it’s going to take the government (federal level) to make this happen. But for some reason we’d rather give those tax dollars to billionaires and elect incompetents like the current president.
- Yes, pricing is much higher than China over here, mainly due to the non-existent support for high-mix low-volume work. NRE adds a lot, and so the prices are high right now. This is why we need to own the stack, optimize for high-mix, and drive down costs over time. It will take a lot of work.
- It will definitely be expensive, and if you raised any eyebrow, you will get “made in the US” remarks immediately. Regarding “drone”, it’s a buzz word, in the past two years everyone is piggy backing on it like how all industries did with “crypto” years ago and “cyber” years before, or others with “AI” in software world now, “drone” is the word for hardware related, any new product or startup that has hardware involved, you will see this word quickly. I hate it and I hate how they ruined this amazing hobby with all their corporate defense BS, but oh well.
- It's important to focus on where real innovation in the space is happening, and to me that's in drones. Some of the hype is overstated but drones are the new additions to conflict, and they're clearly not going away.
- One of your major choices is how much you want to specialise, vs be a general service. I expect you're in the phase of discovering that. Now, with the disclaimer I'm just a random guy who knows not-much about business - and is just a small hobbyist electronics guy - it seems clear that your stiffest headwinds are at General Service. I would be leery of how much success you'd have there, because general PCB service is something the world has A LOT MORE of than it had 10 years ago, and the economics are on balance unfavourable to you.
But to (very slightly!) paraphase you, you think it's important to focus on drones/defense and other nationalist areas where the future is canted toward you, and while that is not an area I'd enjoy working in myself (no personal judgement on you, but I'd rather spend my life doing things other than conflict and war), that is clearly what you know to be your first-rank business chance.
- Yes I agree. If it turns out that there is not enough demand to service in defense, we can use the optimizations found from the defense market to take a stab at the general market. It doesn't make sense to start with that off the bat.
- A lot of the hype is overstated, and I have been in drone world since 2014, but because of the weaponization of them and the global atmosphere of militarization, there’s a LOT of money pouring in now, so everyone wants a piece of that cake. In reality, their (the fpv ones specifically) success rates are around 1/10, but only the successful ones are shown for obvious reasons.
Also, I did mention back in 2020 that drones are the only practical type of robotics compared to others, although I meant for good purposes not how they are used right now.
- Yes even if the success rates are 1/10 they are still causing serious damage for their cost in modern conflicts. Agreed that the hype is overstated.
- Still remember when people mostly referred to them as "quadcopters."
- medium to large defence companies tend to have in house board fabs. I worked in one.
- yes, what was the utilization like?
- 20-40% capacity. Reserve available. Turnaround same day on a board (2 layer). Next day 4 layer. Two days exotic (rogers etc). Pick, place, soldered 2 days or delivered to lab immediately after panel cut.
If they had a fast production run in they could extend to 24 hours operation and triple base capacity.
They did a fair bit of TH though which was manually stuffed and wave soldered which could slow stuff down considerably.
- Very interesting, I'm wondering if that low-utilization rate justifies the capex of building a line.
- It's mostly for security reasons. Both supply chain and secrecy.
- It's also the immense know-how Chinese manufacturers have accumulated at this point. For a 5-piece hobby order $25 shipped, I got feedback confirming a wrong-looking part of my design before they printed.
- And their ability to pollute without regard for life or the future.
- Which manufacturer was that?
- Drones and defense have nothing to do with expense. It is 100% about getting on the approved vendor list, at which point the prices go up.
It’s not like PCB boards in the defense industry are somehow special, though they probably should be.
- > Drones and defense have nothing to do with expense
I would disagree? Look at Helsing, the german manufacturer of loitering munitions, and its direct competitors who are trying hard to get per-unit costs way down. Without even mentioning the myriad of Ukrainian manufacturers who are building cheap and cheerful things under $10,000 per unit (or even under $2500 per unit). There is a very real push within all NATO militaries now to basically copy many of the capabilities the Ukrainians have built in the last 4-5 years.
Not saying that we won't still have lots of huge dollar items and massive programs like the AGM-158 JASSM, but there's a reason why the US paid a company to basically clone the Shahed-136 as the LUCAS at under $50k per unit.
- Volume unit costs matter a lot. What matters less is cost during prototyping and development, where speed to iteration becomes way more important.
- I absolutely agree, if you have just a few people who are each paid 180k a year sitting around waiting for something to arrive because the low-quantity prototyping vendor is slow, it's not the best use of resources at all. One of the reasons why certain companies spend a lot of money buying their own laser sintering 3D printers for low volume test-fit protoypes in the aerospace industry, or invest in their own small-scale CNC stuff to do similar.
- I ran a hardware startup for about a decade. We ended up doing all PCB assembly in China. We did try to find this in the USA, but it was indeed too slow and expensive.
The bottleneck in assembling a PCB is usually component sourcing. My product was not the most complicated, and even then, to assemble in Shenzhen, China, it often took a few weeks to get all the components.
The core issue here is that latency is determined by the outliers. Assembly can't start until you have all units, and the hardest to source one is the bottleneck!
To me, the core innovation here is to plug into the design software to source these long tail items ahead of time.
It's pretty interesting that usually when the PCB is being designed, the designer has no awareness of supply chain. They'll bake in a chip that has a 4 week lead time without even realizing it, when a similar component might be one cent more expensive with much faster lead time.
- This is our first step to work more closely with the designer throughout the process.
Currently there's a wall between the designer and the manufacturer, which hurts lead times massively, we're aiming to bring that down.
- This is an exciting project! My main feedback: you can definitely tell the website content is AI-generated. It's okay to vibe code the design, but I really hesitate when I see vibed writing.
- You're right, putting more attention to that now.
- I'm super excited to try your service and the KiCad plug-in to move supply-chain dialogue closer to point-of-creation makes a TON of sense. That and the speed seem to be the two points of differentiation from Macrofab, who is my current supplier. They will be stiff competition for you as they are a great shop and have a good software interface and a lot of capabilities. I imagine using you guys for quick turn-around needs and them for production and scale?
- Yes macrofab has a great service. We are best for quick turn, but long term we aim to cater for production as well. All in good time.
- > Suddenly we were spending 90% of our time assembling circuit boards instead of growing the business
> When you look at the full process, you realize that assembly is not the bottleneck.
I’m confused, which one is it?
I assume the growth story isn’t great when you factor in the non-automatable tasks and big capital outlays, so your product leaves that to existing CMs and scales the software stack instead?
Do you see this product as being beneficial to subcontractors (presumably still doing the 90% manual work), or does this legitimately reduce the actual workload/costs at the production level?
- Sorry for the confusion, our time was spent doing manual work because we didn't have much automation at all. For the industry, assembly is not the biggest immediate bottleneck, with it being quite commodotized. However, we plan to open an automated assembly facility in the next few months to take stronger advantage of our front-of-house automations.
- This would be incredible for innovation if we can bring this back domestically. It's very hard given lack of raw materials and the supply chain around it often also requires robust network but hopefully this spurs something.
This is something that takes real expertise though, kind of a moonshot for an inexperienced team unfortunately. Would be cool if had mission driven backers otherwise will just end up being hobbyist material. Relying on defense (bubble?) gives at least some breathing room as not actually competing against china for better prices.
- Agreed. For this to work the entire supply chain has to support it. There are starts like mouser and digikey, but the raw materials and production capabilities are even more important.
We believe starting with defense will give us capabilities that we can then bring to other verticals, and will help us make optimizations that bring the cost down. It's impossible to beat china off the bat though.
- When you say PCB at the beginning are you referring to raw PCBs or PCBAs? Presumably your service will be sourcing raw PCBs from China still and just doing PCBA?
When my pal’s raw PCB company went out of business, you could buy a finished PCB from China for less than the cost of FR4, which also came from China. How do you intend to address this supply chain risk? Once China raises your cost of raw PCBs your price argument no longer works.
Also, are you sourcing components from US sources or using China? Recently I stopped purchasing from Digikey and Mouser because their services are much slower than they used to be, and I now get components much faster and for lower cost in China.
- We source PCBs from both China and USA. Some of our customers want incredibly fast turn where Chinese shipping times don't cut it.
> How do you intend to address this supply chain risk?
Haven't yet figured it out. Options are opening bare board fabs or partnering with US fabs and panelizing orders.
- I love to see new players in this space! We’ve done a ton of PCBA through Macrofab. My relationship with them goes back far enough to have been a beta customer and I’ve chatted on the phone with the CEO a few times. It’s interesting comparing what you’re offering and what they offer. When I started using them, the fact that you could just upload Eagle or KiCAD files, get an instant quote, and verify MPN/BOM and parts placement online… without having to zip up and email Gerbers was extraordinary. Their lead-time is longer than yours, around 3 weeks, but the pricing has always kinda hit a sweet spot.
I noticed your KiCAD plugin there too. I am super curious to see what your workflow and pricing looks like. There are definitely times when the 7-day turnaround will be a game changer for us.
I guess one gate there: do you ship to Canada? We do have a US branch that could do the export-import for us, but way easier if we don’t have to route it through them as far as end-to-end delivery time goes.
- Thanks for the feedback. We can ship to Canada, haven't done it yet, but open to it!
- I think this is a huge opportunity — speed, domestic production _and_ overall usability of the process - i do think appearing serious business matters a lot in this space, i found your site a little lacking in terms of prose, details, etc. Really great idea though.
- Site is not cutting it anymore, going to dedicate some better effort to bring it up to standard.
- Nice but the USA are not our global friends anymore.
Anything available in the EU?
- Disclaimer: CTO & Co-Founder of AISLER here
We're trying to make electronic manufacturing (PCB & PCBA) simple, affordable and speedy. A high grade of automation allows prices starting at 12.20 Euros including VAT and shipping. Our software platform is completely built in-house, including state-of-the-art ODB++ integration. Let me know if you've any questions, happy to answer.
- I've only found B2B oriented companies in the EU.
Edit: https://aisler.net/en/partners/librepcb
LibrePCB from Aisler seems to be most like jlcpcb.
You do pay a lot more though due to industrial regulations. Only lead free solder is allowed in the EU, and chemical regulations and waste disposal laws will drive up the price a lot compared to similar services in China and the USA.
- FYI: Aisler is the PCB manufacturer and assembler (based in Aachen iirc). LibrePCB is CAD software.
- China mostly produces ROHS compliant PCBA anyways. This is a non-issue
- I've used https://aisler.net/en (based in Aachen) plenty of times. I like their quality and I was able to pull off some stupidly toleranced layouts. (This is as a hobbyist building some one-off circuit boards). I haven't used their assembly service.
- Not as familiar with the EU market, but have heard good things about Eurocircuits
- Congratulations!
Your timing could not have been better. Yesterday I was talking to a friend about starting a company to tap into the domestic solar inverter market that is about to have a healthy growth due to FCC banning foreign made inverters with radios.
We are planning to build it around STM32 or ESP32 with US parts sourcing and manufacturing.
We are in the project scoping phase. Hopefully we can get something going soon.
- Interesting stuff, definitely a lot of new demand due to the FCC rules. Curious to see how they hold up though.
- Each of these pretty established suppliers offer this service:
- Sunstone
- Advanced Assembly
- Sierra Circuits
- Osh Park
They all have ~7 day lead time or shorter. It all comes down to choosing simple processes with generic parts.
Do you have your own machines or just outsource these orders and ensure the supply chain stuff moves along quickly?
I like the idea, more heads in the game makes it cheaper for everyone, but this seems like another hat in the ring.
- They all have this service, but they don't often stick to these lead times in my experience. We help hold them accountable and in the long term we are opening a facility to bring the cost down further.
- I don't believe OSH Park does PCB assembly, only the manufacture of the PCBs themselves.
- Any resources to learn how to design a circuit board?
- Youtube tutorials are pretty great to get started
- The "Capabilities" section was not what I was expecting. Layers, via sizing, HDI - where's the details?
- Updating that as we speak.
- Curious how the pricing compares to overseas fabs once you factor in the 7-day turn — is that gap closing enough for non-defense teams to switch too, or is this mainly aimed at people who need the domestic supply chain regardless of cost?
- Non-defense teams find value in getting fab done overseas and then turning to us for assembly and procurement. Bare boards are super expensive here.
- The upstream BOM feedback seems especially useful: surfacing availability and lead-time alternatives before layout is final should prevent many avoidable redesign loops. Showing those trade-offs directly in the plugin would make the value easy to evaluate.
- I work in a building with a board assembly line that sits idle most of the time. They have tried securing outside contract work to fill in the gaps. No takers yet.
The only domestic drivers for board fab and assembly are autmotive and defense. They already have their supply chains running.
- Makes sense. Is it that most of the time is spent switching jobs or that there's just not enough jobs going through it?
You're right that automotive and defense make up most of the demand. We also see demand from teams who can't use JLC/PCBway due to the difficulty of cosigning parts outside their catalogue.
- JLCPCB can make boards in less than 7 days easily and for non drone and defense companies.
- You guys should really be making an end to end PCB machine, sourcing the parts and part inventory for custom PCBs really should be the responsibility of the end user.
- Possibly, but our users find value in not having to kit, store, or ship parts to CMs.
- I'm skeptical this is a cost effective for low volume prototyping which is where the speed of made in America matters.
- whats the closest to this that exists today? (??? + pick and place?)
- I'm not the expert but Gemini doesn't say anything exists besides the Voltera V-One (which obviously doesn't work for complex PCBs). I am imagining something like a PCB microfactory the size of a container (or even smaller) that completely handles PCB etch and drill, solder paste application, PnP, baking, and testing.
- That would be super cool. Difficulty comes with multi-layer PCBs, hard to find a solution for laminating.
- PCBA lines are largely automated as of today, issues start when you do high-mix work. Most time ends up being spent switching between jobs and programming machines, meaning that tool usage time is low.
- how does it compare to https://www.circuithub.com ?
- Circuit hub has something very interesting in the works. They're a few steps ahead of us.
We however plan to own the full stack, from design to board bring-up and testing. We believe that design is becoming commoditized with AI tools, but these systems need manufacturers that are involved from the start to bring down lead times.
- what do you mean by in the works? i've used them for years and they were in YC over a decade ago
sounds like your goal is to be an embedded systems job shop based on AI instead of engineers? What's your value over existing AI-accelerated job shops that leverage existing quick-turn domestic PCBA suppliers? as a not-so-random example, https://otekengineer.com/
- Yes, though it was only somewhat recently that they transitioned to building their own automated facility.
We don't plan to do the design ourselves, we realize that our users will be using AI design tools that need to be integrated with the factory. We will build that link.
- what's your vision for that link?
it's not clear to me what the interface to the user is, or who the user is
- What are minimums?
- Minimum board count: 5
Releasing detailed capability docs on our website today or tomorrow.
- Amazing, now if we could just get this for silicon wafers :D All joking aside, would be great to get something like this for shuttle run wafer taping vs the current 6+ month window.
- > Drone and defense teams get boards back in 7 days
Oh
- I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh? Sure it's profitable but there's a reason hardware manufacturing is generally outsourced to the lowest bidder. Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally? Manufacturing hardware (especially if you are not Apple) is generally a capital intensive, low profit margin business that is extremely sensitive to labor costs. The fact that the past two decades of growth in the US is dominated by tech companies is precisely because software and the associated network effects are able to drive disproportionate amount of growth, unlike hardware. The further down the value chain in hardware the more commoditized you are.
- I think you’re actually asking good questions!
> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh
OSH Park is fabulous for what they do, but they don’t do PCBA.
I’m not OP, but I think I can provide some insight anyway:
> Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally
I think that trying to be competitive globally would be a dumb play for these folks, they’re optimizing for something different.
Defence is one sector where this model works, no doubt. But there’s a bigger market that doesn’t have a great domestic story yet (I’m in Canada and work with a variety of CA and US PCB/PCBA houses): fast-turn low-volume PCBA, either for prototype iteration or for industrial one-offs. While I work on a specific “sort of defence adjacent” project right now, my past consulting work would’ve benefitted quite a bit from being able to turn around full PCBA work in 7 days. Macrofab end-to-end was usually 3-4 weeks and cutting that iteration time down would’ve had a solid effect on reducing project timelines if it could’ve happened for a reasonable price. There are domestic manufacturers who have optimized for that… but the price was not something my clients were willing to pay to accelerate their projects. If this hits a sweet spot there… that’ll be really exciting for me.
(I’ve already sent it to my team to start looking at)
- Defense adjacent work is another place where we're seeing some strong pull.
> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh
Yes, OSH Park is awesome. They could add PCBA, but we see the long-term value in owning the full stack (from design to testing of finished boards). Stops us from having a knife fight all the way down.
- > I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh?
There are a number of small but very specialized US based defense sub-component manufacturers that support 15 to 20 people with very good paying jobs, building stuff exactly like NDAA compliant UAS flight controllers. Not everything needs to become gargantuan to be a success.
There can also be very good money in manufacturing specialized things that require the work to be done by US citizens with a TS or TS/SCI clearance if you can get into that market.
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136 points by willcarkner 4 hours ago | 97 comments