JLCPCB seems too good to be true

[bigmessowires]

I placed a JLCPCB order for fabbing and assembly of 20 ATX PSU adapters on September 1, they arrived on September 6. That's only five days door-to-door (which includes two weekend days) for:

• making a custom PCB
• parts procurement
• PCB assembly
• express shipping from China to USA

For all this, I paid the princely sum of $1.38 per board.



As a consumer and hobbyist, this is fantastic. But as somebody who manufactures and sells electronics for a living, I just don't understand how this is possible. I know that labor costs are lower in China, but not this low. People in Shenzhen need to eat too. The amount that I paid for express international shipping is less than what it costs me for standard package shipping within the USA. I don't know how anybody makes a profit fabbing and assembling a bespoke device in tiny quantities and express shipping it 7000 miles for the price of a can of Coke.

I would like to think JLCPCB has such astounding automation and economies of scale that they can manufacture one-off custom gizmos for pennies in a responsible manner and still make a profit. No doubt they have a massive volume of manufacturing. But I still don't see how the numbers pass any back-of-the-envelope sanity test unless they're employing slave labor or getting massive subsidies from somewhere else. Anyone else feel this way? Should I just relax and enjoy?

 

[zigzagjoe]

Even for non trivial boards, they're inexplicably cheap - the last boards I had built were 4 layers of decent size and it still came just over $10 per board. That includes time for someone to review the design for issues and contact me regarding an issue that needed to be fixed. I don't think $60 would be enough for an engineer to even glance at a gerber in the states.

 

[Phipli]

I placed a JLCPCB order for fabbing and assembly of 20 ATX PSU adapters on September 1, they arrived on September 6. That's only five days door-to-door (which includes two weekend days) for:

• making a custom PCB
• parts procurement
• PCB assembly
• express shipping from China to USA

For all this, I paid the princely sum of $1.38 per board.

View attachment 61709

As a consumer and hobbyist, this is fantastic. But as somebody who manufactures and sells electronics for a living, I just don't understand how this is possible. I know that labor costs are lower in China, but not this low. People in Shenzhen need to eat too. The amount that I paid for express international shipping is less than what it costs me for standard package shipping within the USA. I don't know how anybody makes a profit fabbing and assembling a bespoke device in tiny quantities and express shipping it 7000 miles for the price of a can of Coke.

I would like to think JLCPCB has such astounding automation and economies of scale that they can manufacture one-off custom gizmos for pennies in a responsible manner and still make a profit. No doubt they have a massive volume of manufacturing. But I still don't see how the numbers pass any back-of-the-envelope sanity test unless they're employing slave labor or getting massive subsidies from somewhere else. Anyone else feel this way? Should I just relax and enjoy?

I believe that, at least in the past, there was some kind of small package shipping subsidy, but I just heard that word of mouth.

The process is pretty extremely automated, but also, being a first time customer, you will have got a heavy discount. They often have discounts, but not always as much.

I anticipate that if you review the breakdown, you'll find you probably got your boards for free and just paid shipping. That's what I had on my first purchase.

But... I used to make my own PCBs on a small CNC... It just isn't worth it. It's so cheap to get them made.

My thoughts on the morality? I believe that I should take advantage of the opertunity to learn new skills and make something good with it for myself and others. This won't last forever.

 

[Phipli]

One of JLC's factory lines :

 

[chrisrueckert]

Just curious: What are alternatives in Europe?

 

[Phipli]

Just curious: What are alternatives in Europe?

Fritzing used https://aisler.net/. I've never used them, but they're based in Germany.

There are lots though. There is a British firm that used to do 'naked' prototypes. Bare boards for testing. They were cheap, but nothing near china cheap.

 

[bigmessowires]

One of JLC's factory lines :

This guy tours the whole factory with an expert from JLCPCB but never lets her finish a sentence, he's constantly interrupting her and explaining her own factory to her.

 

[Phipli]

This guy tours the whole factory with an expert from JLCPCB but never lets her finish a sentence, he's constantly interrupting her and explaining her own factory to her.

I suspect he is discussing it off screen and then repeating it, but yes, it's a little awkward, but I think his heart is in the right place. He hasn't done much for the last few years after an accident during one of his tours. Suffered brain damage.

He does have a habit of waving his hands near and lunging at moving machines.

 

[jessenator]

This guy tours the whole factory with an expert from JLCPCB but never lets her finish a sentence, he's constantly interrupting

The MO of the youtubist. Full disclosure I haven't watched this particular person's content, but it seems to be the modus among the "cool" kid crowd. I'm on the scale of "boring host has better content" (generally).

I've heard some suggest JLC has state subsidized production, which seems to be the simplest, perhaps reductive answer. Having done similar (identical) jobs with them, and jobs here in the States, I'm struggling to come up with another alternative. It could be JLC's specific operations is simply a loss leader from another company/service/etc altogether. It does seem quite suspicious.

 

[Phipli]

The MO of the youtubist. Full disclosure I haven't watched this particular person's content, but it seems to be the modus among the "cool" kid crowd. I'm on the scale of "boring host has better content" (generally).

I've heard some suggest JLC has state subsidized production, which seems to be the simplest, perhaps reductive answer. Having done similar (identical) jobs with them, and jobs here in the States, I'm struggling to come up with another alternative. It could be JLC's specific operations is simply a loss leader from another company/service/etc altogether. It does seem quite suspicious.

I'm so very sorry for sharing a video that offended you so badly without you watching it. In future I'll be sure to share the other video tours of JLC's factory that don't exist.

 

[bigmessowires]

My guess is there are multiple things happening:

• New customer discount (was $10)
• Intentionally pricing small orders at a loss, in hopes of attracting larger and more profitable orders later
• Massive economies of scale
• Ability to leverage the huge network of electronic suppliers and service companies that exists in Shenzhen and virtually nowhere else in the world
• Cheap shipping because there's huge volume and competition on China-to-USA freight, versus very little USA-to-China freight
• Maybe some government subsidy or other special arrangement to offset shipping costs
• Lower cost of labor than USA or Europe
• Fewer safety and environmental regulations that might otherwise add to the cost
• Lower corporate taxes and business-related fees than USA or Europe

I didn't mean to prompt a debate about the morality of it all, I was just wondering how it's possible for them to charge so little.

 

[GRudolf94]

Your guess is pretty much spot-on. (They keep on giving seemingly absurd discounts, too - having $6 off SMT coupons is common)

 

[cheesestraws]

Yeah - I also suspect that they're pricing aggressively hoping to drive pcbway et al out of business so they can ratchet prices back up.

 

[Phipli]

I believe they do free manufacturing (just shipping) for students if I heard right. That's a thing you do to build familiarity with a product, which people then carry into your workplace.

See MatLab, SolidWorks etc. Very cheap education deals and things that encourage lecturers to use the product... Effectively one loss making sale results in tens of thousands of people going into the workplace with your product being what they are used to using.

As others have said, I suspect they undercharge hobbyists, infrequent users and prototyping, in the hope that they get the big orders.

If you issue a $6 voucher to a hobbyist once every 2 months, its a huge saving. If you're in the business of ordering thousands of boards... It isn't.

What I'm sad about is that they clamped down on panalisation. I used to order loads of tiny boards on a single 100x100 board and it basically cost the same as one board. Now they try to charge me loads of engineering time if I do that.

 

[Melkhior]

Fritzing used https://aisler.net/. I've never used them, but they're based in Germany.

I've had some stuff made by Aisler, back when they had a service to ship you unsoldered components - IIRC, I did my homemade through-hole MAC-VGA adapter & my VGA-222 PMod that way. Fast and reasonably priced. But that service was discontinued in favor of PCB assembly.
Since then, I've looked at making some of my boards with PCB assembly with them, but the costs were always way too high compared to JLCPCB, and not all features were supported (i.e. their web software didn't like the notches for the NuBus bracket, not wide enough).

 

[Jockelill]

I have used Multi Circuit PCB in the past:

PCB Manufacturer

Printed Circuit Boards and SMD-Stencils Online. Prototypes and Series with 1-48 layers starting from 24h express. Top quality✔ Low prices✔ Fast production✔

www.multi-circuit-boards.eu

German based and fair prices, but of course cannot compete with JLCPCB.

 

[Daniël]

If they are operating at a loss, which they may very well be for small orders, I do expect the enshittification of their services at some point in the future. Given panelization has already been upcharged significantly, it's not unlikely.

 

[beachycove]

As for the boards themselves, the widget pricing anomaly mentioned is surely the equivalent of the “dumping” of all the more obvious products such as phones, steel, ships, shoes, etc. in Western markets so as eventually to dominate said markets. This is pretty much the standard strategy and is what our own neoliberal (past 40 years in particular) trade systems have made possible. As St Augustine might put it, the worm of sin has crawled into what theoretically seemed like a workable mechanism and has corrupted it from within.

The moral of this particular story is that, while it may be good for the Western consumer to be able to get cheap widgets, it is good only so long as said Western consumer does not require a properly paid manufacturing job in the widget world in order to eat and keep warm.

As for the postage, apparently there are international postal treaties dating back more than a century that explain the phenomenon; we all agreed in the 19th century how great a thing it would be if internationally, we all carried each others’ parcels for free once they left our own borders. I believe that there are now modest fees levied, but the essence of the arrangement still obtains. The Chinese in particular have clearly leveraged this system to further advance the strategy mentioned above, and obviously subsidize it mightily, as there is no way their postal service costs almost nothing to run domestically, any more than it costs them nothing to produce small runs of custom circuit boards.

I believe that an eccentric gentleman named Mr. Trump huffed and puffed about both bits back when in power, and rightly so in my view, but he obviously did not manage to solve the problem.

 

[olePigeon]

Spoiler: Seems like hijacking the thread to talk about shipping, so I'll leave it behind this curtain.

@beachycove The Universal Postal Union is an international member group where basically the G8 countries offer to subsidize shipping for less developed countries so they can export goods and hopefully raise people out of poverty. However, China is exploiting their membership to its fullest. Despite having a GDP of $17 trillion, China is still considered a developing country and are in the same category as Kazakhstan.

In regards to President Trump ... well, there're about 50 asterisks there. He just happened to find a list of legitimate grievances he could finally blame on a group of people who weren't immigrants or Democrats. And like most of his policies, went about it in worst way possible, and solve absolutely nothing.

 

[Melkhior]

@bigmessowires Also beware, you may have customs duties on top of the base cost. I don't know how it's handled in the US, but over here in continental Europe even though for the 'small stuff' they usually don't bother, for larger orders (NuBusFPGA, IIsiFPGA, ...) I did get the bills eventually...