Pricing
What we charge, published.
Three kinds of money go into taking hardware from a design file to production, and most sourcing companies blur them together. We separate them. What we charge is fixed and published below. What the factory charges is quoted per project and paid to them, not to us. Third party costs are passed through at cost.
Block one
What we charge
Everything in this section is our fee for engineering, oversight and management. None of it is the cost of physically making your product. That is the next section.
Production Readiness Audit
EUR 2,400
Fixed
Included
- Your design reviewed against manufacturing reality
- Process and tooling feasibility
- The cost drivers in your design identified
- Supplier route assessed
- A written report
- A verdict
- A readout call
Not included
- Manufacturing, tooling, or any third party cost
This is where every engagement starts.
Prototype programmes
From EUR 6,500
Engineering and management. Not tooling, not parts, not factory time.
Scoped by the audit, then quoted stage by stage. Each stage is fixed price and approved by you before it starts.
Included
- The engineering and industrialisation stages your product actually needs, drawn from the eleven stage journey, priced individually
Not included
- Tooling, materials, factory charges, third party costs
Production
3 to 8 percent of order value
Set at design freeze
Lower volumes and more complex programmes sit higher in the band, large repeat volumes sit lower.
Covers
- Production oversight
- Quality control and issue resolution
- Freight and customs coordination
- Supplier management
Does not cover, and we take no percentage on
- Freight, duties, taxes, inspection, certification. Those are third party costs and they pass through at cost.
Block two
What manufacturing costs
These are published industry ranges, not our quotes, and not any specific supplier's pricing. Your real manufacturing cost depends on your design, and nobody can tell you what it is until an engineer has read it. That is what the audit is for.
| Soft or prototype tooling | USD 2,000 to 10,000 |
|---|---|
| Bridge tooling | USD 3,000 to 8,000 |
| Production steel tooling, low volume | USD 8,000 to 30,000 |
| Production steel tooling, mid volume | USD 25,000 to 75,000 |
| Full engineering to mass production, comparable firms | USD 30,000 to 190,000 |
Why the early decisions dominate
The same 30 gram moulded housing, at five different volumes.
| Volume | Mould | Per part |
|---|---|---|
| 100 units | USD 5,000 | USD 52.50 |
| 1,000 units | USD 5,000 | USD 6.80 |
| 10,000 units | USD 18,000 | USD 2.75 |
| 50,000 units | USD 35,000 | USD 1.40 |
| 250,000 units | USD 85,000 | USD 0.79 |
Every decision that sets this curve is made before the tooling is cut. That is the window the audit sits in.
Ranges compiled from published industry sources, including makerstage.com and titoma.com. This is a compilation, not original research.
Block three
Why not go direct to the factory?
A fair question, and the numbers above invite it. Here is the honest answer.
The factory is not on your side of the table.
They earn more when engineering hours go up, when the tooling is more complex, and when the unit price is higher. That is not a criticism, it is what being the manufacturer means. We are paid by you, so our incentives sit where yours do. On production programmes we take a share of any cost reduction we engineer and hand the whole saving to you permanently after twelve months. A supplier cannot offer that, because for them it is a pay cut.
The tooling number above is a decision, not a fact.
Whether your part needs an eighteen thousand dollar tool or a thirty five thousand dollar one depends on cavity count, complexity, undercuts and material choice. Those are proposed by the party that gets paid to build the tool. Someone should be asking whether each of them is necessary, and it should not be the person invoicing for it.
A first quote has nothing to be compared against.
If you have not bought tooling before, every number looks plausible. That is where money leaves quietly. Not as a disaster, but as a unit cost that stays higher than it needed to be for the entire life of the product.
A single overseas order and an ongoing relationship are handled differently.
It affects pricing, position in the queue, and how seriously a problem is taken when something goes wrong. It is hard to see from Europe and easy to feel later.
We are not a step between you and the factory. We are the only party in the room whose interests match yours.
Block four
What we do not charge for
Third party costs pass through at cost. We take no percentage on freight, duties, taxes, inspection or certification.
You remain the importer of record. We arrange and run the import, the import itself stays with you, which keeps customs and product conformity where they belong.
No markup is folded into factory quotes. The factory price you see is the factory price we pay.
The audit is the entry point.
An engineer reads your actual files and returns a written report with the cost drivers, the required changes and a clear verdict, at a fixed price agreed before we start.
Start with the audit