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Comment by ZenoArrow | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing Kitspace on HN, your site looks promising. At first I thought it may be hard to gain traction over the established players (such as Tindie), but after looking into how the site works it looks like it has the potential to lower the cost for acquiring the hardware, as well as reduce the customer support burden for open hardware creators. Nice work!

Any short term plans to expand the site further?

I had thought that selling solder stencils perhaps might be a good optional extra for larger boards, but I guess they could prove a little expensive. Cheapest I've found with a quick search was this site:

https://www.oshstencils.com/

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Cheers! I don't think it's in competition with Tindie either. I want the site to serve a niche of creators that can't be bothered with the rest (i.e. packing and selling). I think this opens up a world of designs that don't have commercial viability. My special areas of interest are music gear and scientific instrumentation (but of course that doesn't dictate what types of designs people decide to put up).

The cost for a one-off order is always more than something that is made multiple times so I it's not a question of competing on price. Kitspace currently optimizes for one-off orders (batching orders of a single design for multiple people would be interesting too though).

I am curious, how do you think it lowers the support burden? Do you mean they can just say: "you soldered it, I don't know, works for me" or is it something more? :D

I think the stencils are best left to the batching services and Aisler and PCBway, which are linked from Kitspace, offer them too (and they should pick out the relevant solder-paste Gerber files).

EDIT: Oh, and regarding planned features check: https://github.com/monostable/kitspace#planned and the work-in-progess (WIP) pull-requests: https://github.com/monostable/kitspace/pulls

> "I am curious, how do you think it lowers the support burden? Do you mean they can just say: "you soldered it, I don't know, works for me" or is it something more? :D"

Yeah, pretty much the former. Selling a product directly, even in kit form, implies that you're stating that the parts you supply will be fit for purpose, whereas with a site like Kitspace I'd suggest it's up to the person assembling the boards to get things working (though that won't stop some people asking for help). What Kitspace seems to do is to reduce the friction between seeing a board an individual is interested in and the ordering of the suggested parts, which is a step forward for the user experience of open source hardware.

From the fabs I usually use (PCBWay, JLCPCB) I've found it's usually cheapest to order them along with the PCBs themselves. On PCBWay they're about $10. JLCPCB they're $9.

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