Of the few boards we have up on Tindie, I have been rethinking the current pricing. I was at the time, basing prices on a mix of perceived costs and hopeful scaling. To not bury the lead, I will be increasing the pricing (hopefully temporarily), but we will have a discount Tindie sale going on this weekend. We will also have about a dozen or so of each board available in the coming weeks in what is hopefully the final revision till we can panelize the boards.

To explain things better, I'll go over where the current prices come from and our costs now and in the future.

The initial prices I came up with for the boards were based on 4 times cost of goods. In this case, the cost of the boards from OSHPark and the components based on small quantity purchasing from Mouser or Digi-key. These prices were high, so I tried to set prices compared to other breakout boards with similar components. I also started negotiating with Arrow and have received reasonable pricing and planned to eat some costs while building to higher production. It was more important to see what boards people were interested in. So far, it is not many.

At this point, I think we should concentrate on producing demo projects utilizing the boards and flexible circuits. This may spark interest and eventually justify higher quantities and better pricing. So in the next couple of days, I'll be recalculating the board prices based on costs and effort. I'll also be separating out the options to individual products to make it easier to understand what we sell. If you want them cheap, get them this weekend with code 101971C (or right now before I figure out what the real prices should be).

Our current costs: With the added size of the new castellations, OSHPark is a bit more pricey going from $0.50-$1.00 to $1.00-$3.00 . I have been swapping out passives to be sourced easier by Arrow or Avnet, so when we can order from them the price may come down. Right now components cost around $4-10 and will drop to under $5 for most boards once we are buying consistently from Arrow.

Hand assembly is around 15-30 minutes, inspection and testing is also around 15-30 minutes. I will be developing bed of nails testers for some Flex Modules once volume increases to justify it. Any reworking necessary is past the pricing of the module, assuming it is repairable. Programming isn't factored in, though we may load Espruino into the STM32 Flex Modules if there is interest or we put it in demos.

We can make our own panels with multiple designs. A couple of CMs have deals for new customers and depending on how little engineering is needed it can be comparable in cost. The pricing looks to be around $1.00-$2.00 per board, but with better silkscreen. (I have been having serious problems with silkscreens on boards this small). This can be a cost effective way to proof single board panel runs with better tab routing or v-cut compared to OSHPark and we can pick the board color. So we can do runs like this and even if a board or two turns out bad, we can still use the others.

The initial single board panel runs will cost similar to the multiple design panel with NRE priced in. However, boards will then be sub $1.00 after assuming no revisions. This doesn't save much money, but a single board panel will allow us to use an assembly house. The first assembly house run will require NRE and a steel stencil which effectively double the costs per 100, but after that run boards will only be $4.50 to assemble.

I have a feeling it will take a kickstarter or similar to get us into production levels. We were thinking of producing project kits (ie. the Dance Kit) with Flex Modules and a ready to go flexible circuit board. That may be what draws interest and may also make a decent kickstarter. So we will be working on the Dance Kit and similar concepts.