And that is domestic versus imported. In Shenzhen they do production of smaller quantities in 12 hours overnight for $30 extra with local express delivery.

I hung out with a friend of mine in Shenzen who does this stuff all the time (and is Chinese not that is super important other than the fact being fluent helps a ton).

Together we prototyped a product over a 2 month period, him handling the HW and EE bits and me writing the board firmware and HIL simulator/test-harness.

We would get some boards, he would find and correct any issues with the board, get a new file to the board house before 5pm and we would get new boards in the morning at 9am delivered by a motorbike courier for about $20 or something. As a software guy that seemed pretty insane to me.

All up we probably did about 6 or 7 HW revisions like that and a few of those probably could have been avoidable if more care was taken but why would we when it's so cheap to iterate so quickly?

Unfortunately for various reasons we didn't choose to continue the project but I learnt a hell of a lot and really enjoyed hanging in Shenzhen and getting to understand the hacker culture there a bit more. We burnt overall a pretty small amount of money to learn some important lessons that I think would have been much more expensive anywhere else in the world.

Wow, that sounds like a really cool experience.

If you every write more about it, please post a link here in HN, I'm sure tons of people would be interested in more details about the what, why, how of what you were doing, and life in Shenzhen.

god I wish I could do this (I will some day)

I do this all the time. OP is talking about of their ass.

China is dramatically cheaper than domestic.

If it wasn't for the DoD requiring all military parts be domestically manufactured, there probably wouldn't be a board house (or metal fab) left in the US.

I haven't used pcbway so maybe they're much better, but I can say that messups and throwaway board issues are common enough with JLCPCB assemblies that their "sorry, here's a $5 coupon" response is a meme in hobbyist communities. They're very hard to trust for anything truly complex or critical.

I’ve heard very positive things about pcbway. I use JLCPCB regularly for fab and assembly. Most issues I’ve had come down to misunderstandings due to problems in their web order PCB viewer, which can be slightly janky. I have however learned to use it properly and I don’t have that type of error anymore.

As far as PCB fab or PCBA quality issues, I’m unable to think of any problems I’ve had across 15+ orders over the last three years. I just got another two PCBA jobs back in the last couple weeks and they were great.

I’m honestly in awe of what JLCPCB does and it’s a big inspiration to me for how much better things could be in the USA if we were committed to manufacturing.