Ooh, crowdsupply looks interesting. This is my first time seeing it.
There are a couple of things to be aware of - everything is shipped to the US and then distributed from there (using Mouser US).
From the project point of view this means, depending on where things are manufactured) tariffs can come into play. The terms of shipping to mouser are delivery duty paid - so it’s the shipper who pays.
For backers it does mean people outside of US can pay quite high shipping costs.
The other thing from a project point of view is that mouser is a distributor. They want a reasonable (around 40%) margin on the things they ship.
With CrowdSupply there are two sets of orders:
Orders placed during the campaign - the project gets the full money (minus fees etc…)
Orders placed after the campaign and any additional bulk orders - the project gets the wholesale price.
I wrote a fairly detailed write up of it here: https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro
We spent oodles of time on it, learned lots, build a fairly simple product but ended up selling it through some of the bigger RPi retailers. It was all an excellent learning experience, and ignoring our time we made about 50p out of the entire batch of a thousand. Factor in our time and it was a complete financial disaster, but we were young and carefree and had fun doing it!
Presumably the contract doesn't allow you to sell product directly if you wanted too. The other thing I'm curious about is that CrowdSupply does continue to list "buying options" long after the creator has gone away. Which makes me wonder if they have some sort of rights to tooling etc post campaign?
I need to check the exact wording in my contract - but post campaign you can sell through other channels if you want to (which would allow you to do it directly).
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/capable-robot-components/program...
https://github.com/CapableRobot/CapableRobot_USBHub_Driver/i...