I'd highly recommend you revisit your protection of customer's IP. Considering that you require source files (not just the industry standard gerbers), your legal terms are very unfavorable to customers. This makes me uncomfortable because it makes my IP much easier to leak. As written, I cannot justify the risks given your agreement.

Nothing in the legal terms explicitly prevents your employees from using my designs for other purposes. If you leak my IP and I find out 13 months later, your terms prevent me from seeking damages because you only cover 12 months from manufacturing.

I like that you have an NDA that I can opt in to, but you should be offering the NDA by default when I upload the files. I should not have to go looking for it in your documentation.

Edit: I realize that there is also limited protection and a lot of risk using a Chinese manufacturer. But requiring source files makes it much, much, easier to look at my design, recognize what it's for, and reproduce it, or at least copy the innovative parts of my design.

I wish you well, domestic electronic production is something we need very badly.

I won't complain about the price, I understand it's going to be more expensive than China. But it's a tough one for me. I have a budget that I have to work with, and while I have some flexibility 3X prices (your site priced $9k compared to JLC's $2k, even after tariffs and shipping) make the project nonviable for me. I hope you can continue to improve pricing over time as you scale.

Also your parts selection interface needs a lot of work. I have a very simple board and I had to go through clunky search and select for parts, even when the digikey part number was in the description.

I recently went through the exercise of asking one of the Chinese manufacturers how much it would cost to build me a board (a bit pirate adapter board for ESP3 that does all the voltage conversions to the GPIO pins so you don't burn something out). Board layout & BOM already exist on github. They do 5 boards minimum. Ok, so I figure I can sell the other 4 boards, probably not a big deal. Total's about $400. Then we get to the point where I'm about the pull the trigger and it goes to a page on tariffs and it looks like at least 45% + they want my SSN to give to CBP to collect the tariff. That's a hard "Nope" on sending my SSN to China. So I'm going to give this a look.

The site quotes prices for ≥4 layer board production are on the order of 10x JLCPCB. I can pay for DHL overnight from JLC and still come in from uploading my design to holding it in my hand ~7 business days or less.

A domestic PCB manufacturing pipeline, has been a pipe dream for me an many other Hardware startup EEs for a long time. Until costs are more competitive, CN still gets the business. Hope you can bring costs for small batch prototype PCB manufacturing down further in the future, then you will have our business!

Looks interesting. As a US manufacturer/designer I will be keeping an eye on this closely.

Currently, all assembly is done in house (in the US) but bare PCBs typically are still made in CN. We used to produce everything overseas and just do the QA/test in the US but during the chip shortage I ended up setting up the production line to attempt to eliminate any possible shortages/tariffs.

It is a difficult struggle manufacturing commercial products in the US (doubly so with an openhardware project) since the final cost is the major blocker but I decided it was worth it for many reasons. Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there. I see you are planning to lean heavily on automation/AI for this, will be watching to see how it all progresses.

There are still some major blockers in the US. Commercial/Industrial real estate being a big one. Costs are not going down...even if employee count is minimized.

I wish nothing but the best for the project.

Adding to the litany of feedback: your BOM parser and manager is a source of pain. For a few BOM items it's fine, but for 50+ with 500+ placements there it's a heavy human lift with a lot of human error that is ripe for automation. Also, DNP interpretation are large hazard for silent failures. The spreadsheet is gospel.

We've had a few batches of mostly assembled (minus through hole parts) prototype boards made with y'all recently, pretty stoked how quick it is. Plus no tarrifs vs the last PCBway order.

Curious, why are surface mount USB-C connectors not able to be done as part of the surface mount components (treated as a through hole I think)? Too fiddly?

Business 101, page 1, line 1:

"Never put any friction between your customer and giving you money"

Dude, absolutely get rid of the requirement to make an account to get a quote. Understandable(ish) to need one to check-out, but hell "Check-out as guest" was probably one of the most profitable innovations in e-commerce ever.

A longer list of accounts is not worth more than a longer list of orders.

Since you have been building for years you must be aware of how tariffs affect the viability. how would a reduction to zero affect the project?

Andrew, congrats on the launch! Great to see another scaled manufacturer and assembly line here in Massachusetts. I helped scale another startup with personalized for 3D prints for orthodontic braces (https://lf.co/blog/deloitte-fast500-2024), so feel to reach out to exchange tips since the generic mass manufacturing world is not well suited for this new world of “one size fits one” at a global scale.

Also, one question to pick your team’s brain: What’s your team’s AI PCB workflow and design tips to work with your production line? Any specific tips for ESP32-related integrations?

Are you considering any in-house fab capabilities? Are you considering accepting consigned fabbed boards?

Hey,

Are you interested in partnerships? I'm running pcbjam.com (web port of KiCad with collab, sharing, git, AI etc.) and I'm looking for a partner to do what EasyEDA is to JLC. Where can I find you?

Hi. I'm a little confused about how many companies are under your umbrella. Is CircuitLabs the parent company for The Grid and all these other companies on this page? https://www.circuithub.com/case-studies

GERBER is the standard. Why won't you accept it?

What's the refinement process been like over the last five years? Many small problems or a few larger ones?

Are you manufacturing in the UK as well? Saw on your site you are hiring mechanical engineers here.

How automated is your process. If it is the vast majority of it then why can’t you price match China. Are there other factors besides labor that causes the higher prices?

How much of a concern are environmental regulations?

I'd love to see you successful, so wanted to comment:

The app feels very vibe-coded, and gives impression it's not well tested and polished for a new user/project.

I appreciate PCBs aren't the usual the consumer-level type of user, but I felt confused by a lot compared to JLCPCB. Hope that helps.