PCB Cost Calculator for Estimating the Cost of PCB Manufacturing and Assembly
Price, quality, delivery time and service are the most common criteria engineers concern when choosing a PCB manufacturer, and generally speaking most people should concern about the price first. Then, how to find out the cheapest one from hundreds of PCB fab houses? The answer is PCB cost estimator! In this article I will introduce the most popular printed circuit board cost calculator. Feel free to leave a comment if you have better recommendations.
PCBShopper
PCB Shopper is the most popular PCB price comparison site that most people recommend where you can compare 25 PCB manufactures and 8 PCB Assembly manufactures at once.
It’s pretty simple to use and quick to get pcb quote online. Just enter your PCB parameters, destination and delivery time, click “Get Prices” then it shows you prices from different manufacturers including Seeed Studio, DirtyPCBs, OSHPark and the best known manufacturers in Asia, North America and Europe.
From the result we can get price, estimated time from different PCB houses. As we said before, we also concern board’s quality and service, then I would recommend you to read the review of purchased users leave on pcbshopper.com. Click “Read or write reviews” in the result to read review.
The cons:
This tool is not 100% perfect. First, only 25 PCB manufactures would be calculated, and actually there are hundreds of PCB makers online that it is very limited especially for those people who want to find the PCB fab near them. Secondly, PCB Shopper is good for engineering students, hobbyists and engineers who work for small company because all of the manufactures in PCBShopper are focus on PCB prototype and low-volume production. Besides, the shipping ways showed in the result is limited and total days sometimes is irresponsible.
Anyway, PCBShopper is the best site for PCB price comparison.
Ladyada PCB Cost Comparison Calculator
Like PCBShopper, this page is a PCB cost calculator for prototype PCB. It’s very old project and the webmaster isn’t maintaining it anymore, a lot of information is outdated, but still some people like it.
Enter your board’s width, length, quantity and size, click “Calculate Cost” then you get PCB cost and shipping from 13 PCB makers.
Compared with PCBshopper.com, this PCB cost calculator also calculate Gold Phoenix, Olime and a few other fabs.
Printed circuit board cost calculator is only a tool to help, you must enter the PCB order page to calculate the real price. Seeed Studio Fusion offer online instant quote without hidden cost for both PCB and PCB Assembly service in their order page https://www.seeedstudio.com/fusion_pcb.html . Please note that most well-known PCB houses offer online quote for PCB but few for PCBA. If you’re finding the cheapest PCB prototype, then no doubt Seeed Fusion is your first choice with only $4.9 for 10 copies boards!
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