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Comment by trebor | Hacker News Reader

The idea might be good, but the price is extravagant. I think the parts should cost only $60-70, maybe less, so charging nearly $148 is laughable. Especially when I can get a nice, brand-name watch for $118 or so.

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Generally you want to charge 4x your BOM (bill of materials) to cover shipping, fulfillment, customer support, etc. For such a small run (50 pieces) your costs are probably a lot higher than that of a large manufacturer; in their case they'd probably want to do > 4x to actually turn a profit. At $148 I'd be amazed if they were doing more than breaking even – these guys are doing it for the learning experience (and it says so on their blog).

Thinking back on this, I think it's entirely possible to build this product without an RTC or microcontroller. It should be entirely possible to wire up a switch, 555 timer(s), vibrator, and a battery... and easily build it for less than $10 in electronic parts.

What was the price? They sold out of them and have apparently taken it down now.

They posted that it was £90. That converts to $147.71 USD today.

So presumably if anything the price wasn't high enough...

Apples and oranges comparison: this is not a watch in the traditional sense. It's more analogous to a timer. In any case, it's a completely new product which means there probably aren't many efficiencies of manufacturing like there would be with watches.

With the same money you can buy a Pebble, and I'm sure that someone could easily write a Pebble app that vibrates every 5 minutes.

I have not been able to find a good solution to having a personal vibrating timer with me. Requirements: Easy to set so no frictional cost to starting a pomodoro for instance. Does not beep. Keeps vibrating until silenced rather than vibrating once and then stopping (I don't notice these).

Pebble has a timer app that meets all your requirements. I use it for pomodoros, laundry, steeping tea, cooking rice, etc. Unbelievably handy.

I think that pushes me over the edge on pebble. Thanks!

Sorry, but the price I "specced out" was with the modules from Adafruit. If you actually made a custom PCB, etc, you could easily hit the $50 mark with only 10s of units, in my opinion. Especially since the processor is unimportant: there are no complex calculations to perform.

> "I think the parts should cost only $60-70, maybe less"

Consider that the thinkgeek 'annoyatron' is sold for $10. So the guts of this device cost far less than $10. A cheap watch band, better looking than the one this has, can be had for under $20 on Amazon...

Throw the rest of the money into having a nice brass enclosure machined, then pot it with epoxy to make it reasonably water-resistant as well...

I could do it for free with the alarm snooze feature on my 5 year old blackberry.

Walking around with a phone strapped to your wrist would be awkward.

And yet people strap them to their arms while running around town wearing nothing but spandex.

That would create an alarm that you must reset every five minutes, rather than simply notifying you in the background that five minutes have passed.

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