OSH Park has been doing 4 layer boards for at $10 per square inch for a set of 3 for years. Shipping included. 2 layer for $5/sq in. Much cheaper for anything but the largest boards.

It was actually only recently that China low volume manufacturing beat out OSH Park for very small boards once you factored in shipping.

At one point recently, I used OSH Park to make a PCB that was exactly 1 square inch, and I felt like I was stealing money from someone with how cheap it was.

For the record, college was more than 3 years ago for me, and $33/board (last I checked) does not beat any of the other prototyping services except at very large sizes - they go up to 60 sq in for that price.

That's not bad. Sierra and Protologix are much more expensive.

"Not quite at China prices" is something of an understatement. JLCPCB offer five 100mm*100mm 4-layer boards for $7. Not $7 each, $7 total for five boards. Shipping to Europe is $1.50.

For a company doing R&D, this difference is so small it hardly matters. It's less than an hour of an engineer's time.

If the whole Twitter -> X transition and DOGE has taught us anything, those costs don't magically disappear, they add up over time and get passed down as inflation. Are you really measuring an engineer's time properly? There is an implicit assumption that an engineers time is at 100% utilization which is never true. This mentality you described allows people to get sloppy with costs. At some point you need to do a form of Zero Based Budgeting.