How much does it cost to develop and manufacture an electronic product? (2022)

For a normal hard plastic like ABS, you basically have two options: a "soft" tool or a "hard" tool. These are both usually made of steel, even aluminium can be too soft at temperature and pressure for good parts.

The difference is that a soft tool is a fairly normal steel that can be milled on a standard 3D CNC machine. This makes it maybe $10k and a few weeks to make, given a suitable design. You can make probably 1000 parts with a tool like this (maybe more depending on the part and the tolerance needs).

A hard tool is made from a very hard "tool steel". There are some different alloys in use but there all extremely difficult to machine - the main method f is Electro-discharge machining. This is a rather involved process, usually involving milling heads that can then spark erode metal to he same shape (look up EDM if you haven't seen it, it's cool). This whole process is more like $300k and takes 3-6 months for a 1-2 action tool. It's likely to be the biggest capex line item for setting up mass manufacture.

For prototyping and low volume manufacture, I strongly recommend Model Solutions in South Korea (https://www.model-solution.com/en/m/main). For us they used to turn around injection moulded parts in quantities of 1k+ in 2 weeks (including postage), at very reasonable prices (used to because I haven't needed them for a couple of years).

> Thank you so much for applying to be a Founding Member at the Hardware Academy.

> There were only 20 slots available for the first batch of Founding Members, yet within just 24 hours I had 130 people apply.

> Although you were not selected as one of the first Founding Members, you will still be given a great discount and early access to the Academy. You will only pay $35/month or $309/year.

As far as I recall, there was no disclosure of a limit on the number (only on time). They say people don't remember what you say, but they never forget how they made you feel. I felt like this was some combination of deception to pump up his email list and/or bait and switch on the offering.

A few tricks I've picked up for dealing with being mid-scale:

1. Rubber stamps are cheap and a low-environmental-impact way to brand packaging. Stickers are cheap too, but less low-impact. If you live in a major city, there's probably a stamp maker near you with a 1 or 2 day turnaround.

2. Packaging inserts can be laser cut out of cardboard in small quantities, if you can find a hack space near you with a shared laser. You can do cardboard design using the sheet-metal tooling in fusion 360, but do the prototyping with scrap cardboard and an exacto knife - it's way faster than starting digitally.

3. Cardboard sourcing is harder than you'd think - you run into minimum order issues just like with buying custom boxes.

4. For enclosures, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36115141

This is notable because the enclosure costs for injection molding can dominate costs otherwise. Eg, getting a PCB manufacturered and assembled from places like JLC is cost effective at any volume. There's no comparable option for injection molding.

This is interesting to me, and the article implicitly touches on it; the parts that seem most important: PCB design and firmware writing, other than the time costs, are dwarfed once you introduce injection molded enclosures. Or if you need certification for an intentional radiator.

Concept to sales in stores can be a multi-year cycle. There are late night meetings with factories in China. Patent issues that can require workarounds that seem absurd to those of us in software. Iteration time of product concepts that require a physical prototype can take months of work between a designer and the manufacturer.

And then there is one of the most important final steps of having the product end up in stores across the world: shipping!

Pre-COVID a shipping container ran between $6-9k, during COVID it ballooned up to $36k. Margins suddenly got waaaay smaller and that had a trickle down effect where even retailers were then pushing for higher margin to compensate —- squeezing her company on both ends.

Don’t even get me started on Amazon….

Quadruple that number again to estimate your retail price.