The PCB’s for the kits and projects on this blog are made by cheap manufacturers. These manufacturers don’t especially cater to hobbyists but would like to have filler orders to keep production running when there are no large orders available. The PCB manufacturers sell this production time cheaply, the downside for the customer is the long or uncertain delivery time.
When shopping for PCBs you can sometimes tweak two parameters : the delivery time and the number of boards. A longer delivery time will lower the cost, a larger number of boards will raise the total cost but in general lower the cost per board, sometimes by a lot.
The manufacturers will typically want you to deliver gerber files. Making and checking gerbers is a blogpost by itself, the BatchPCB FAQ has an entry about them and Sparkfun has a tutorial. Before I have PCB’s made I check them at circuitpeople.com and if the board is really new I usually render it with Eagle3D.
Here is a list of PCB manufacturers I have used and some that I have not yet used but offer interesting services.
MakePCB
MakePCB is by far the cheapest PCB manufacturer I have found. The site is not as detailed as the competitors site and the communication is not very helpful at all. The price is unbeatable. I have used their service in the past expect to use them in the future.
- Price : http://www.makepcb.com/
- Specs : – here –
BatchPCB
BatchPCB is Sparkfun’s PCB Pooling service. The designs are panelised by BatchPCB and the panels are made and cut by by Gold Phoenix and sent to the US in bulk. BatchPCB then sends out the PCB’s to the end customers. Specs and tolerances can be found here, prices are here. BatchPCB is a great service and offers other services like selling your boards to other users. I have stopped using BatchPCB because BatchPCB is expensive and located in the US. Sending boards from China to the US and sending them from the US to Europe adds to the cost and delivery times.
- Price : “$10 setup fee (per order – appears as a handling fee), 2 layer – $2.50/sq. inch 4 layer – $8.00/sq. inch”
- Specs : – here –
Eurocircuits
Eurocircuits have their own manufacturing and pooling service. The quality of the boards is high and the price is too. Where MakePCB keeps communication to just below the bare minimum, Eurocircuits has a hand-full of sites in different languages, and a coice of 4 or 5 different PCB services. The result is pretty confusing. The price calculator is shared between all sites but needs magic parameters in the URL to determine the price. I suspect they have different prices for different kinds of customers. Eurocircuits have been partnering with Elektor and offer Elektor PCB’s no longer offered by Elektor themselves.
Board and price examples
Say we’d like to have 25 Arduino shields made. The shields are double sided, with double sided solder mask and a single silkscreen. The PCB’s are not rectangular but have the traditional Arduino Shield bump and holes. The board is 69 x 53 mm. Shipping is to the Netherlands.
| Manufacturer | clearance | trace | via | Price 1 | Price 25 | S&H 1 | S&H 25 | Total 1 | Total 25 | Lead time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MakePCB | 0.2 mm (8 mil) | 0.2 mm (8 mil) | 0.3 mm (12 mil) | 26.72 € | 56.76 € | 6.21 € | 14.73 € | 32.48 € | 71.49 € | about 4 weeks |
| BatchPCB | 8 mil (0.2 mm) | 8 mil (0.2 mm) | 20 mil (0.5 mm) | 15 USD | 375 USD | about 18 USD | about 18 USD | 33 USD | 393 USD | about 20 days |
| Eurocircuits | 8 mil | 8 mil | 0.35 mm | 53.81 € | 121.13 € | 10.01 € | 10.16 € | 63.81 € | 131.29 € | about 30 days |
Other PCB services
There are a couple PCB services that I have not used yet but that seem to offer interesting services.
Gold Phoenix PCB
Gold Phoenix PCB is the manufacturer that supplies the PCB to BatchPCB. BatchPCB collects orders to fill up panels. Once a panel is full, BatchPCB has the panel made, cut up to the individual boards and sent to BatchPCB. This “buy a panel” service is also available to end users. The panel sizes for 2 layers are 1000 cm2 or 650 cm2. The shield in this example has an area of about 37 cm2. One panel would yield 27 Arduino shields. Gold Phoenix is a bit more expensive than the cheapest option I have used but is interesting because they support tighter tolerances and, for a fee, inner cuts, different color soldermasks and different color silkscreens. You could do stuff like white PCB’s with black lettering.
PCB-Pool
PCB-Pool is one of the older PCB manufacturers that offer their services online. PCB-Pool is interesting because the offer solder paste stencils, sometimes for free. They also have a Front panel service.
More price examples
Two notes about the prices here :
- In this example PCB-Pool will make 30 PCB’s for the same total price as 25. Apparently they are filling panels.
- In this example GoldPhoenix will make 27 PCB’s.
| Manufacturer | clearance | trace | via | Price 1 | Price 25 | S&H 1 | S&H 25 | Total 1 | Total 25 | Lead time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GoldPhoenixPCB | 7 mil | 7 mil | 15 mil | 99 USD | 99 USD | 10 USD | 10 USD | 109 USD | 109 USD | 8 working days |
| PCB-Pool | 0.15 mm (6 mil) | 0.15 mm (6 mil) | 0.3 mm (12 mil) | 43.73 | 198.30 Euro | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
–
I’d like to add Sierra Circuits to this list.
https://www.protoexpress.com/
Take a look at international circuits — http:/www.internationalcircuits.com. They have similar offerings to GP, makepcp, except pricing for 4 layers and up is much better. US based customer service which is always a plus.
Excellent review. I’ve read this many times over the last few months.
As a DIYer I’ve tried numerous PCB services but couldn’t get hold of a PCB batching/pooling service that would really give me a sensible price if all I wanted to order was just ONE board or maybe 2. This really got in the way when I started offering crossover design services to DIYers because when you want a crossover built you want only 2 PCBs – not 5 or 10. Out of frustration I have decided this week to take a shot at offering a PCB batching service for DIYers myself, handing over filled-up panels to a fab house here in Bangalore set up by a European PCB major. The economics looks tempting – your example 69 x 53mm board, 2-sided, both sides silkscreen, both sides soldermask, gold finish, 100% flyprobe-tested, would cost you just 7 euro, no setup charges, no minimum. And it’s made by a European brand name.
All the detail is up on http://www.audesine.com. Now it’s for the DIY community out there to exploit it!
Best,
-Ram
Hey I found out one website which shows the list of all supplier’s who sells pcb along with their rates
http://www.pcbprice.com/compare/europe
User Can also write their reviews regarding those supplier..
Hope this sites serves all your purpose
Thanks to Alex, visited http://www.pcbprice.com it saved me some bucks , again thanks for the tip.
I ordered some PCB’s from ‘MakePCB after reading this article. They finally arrived today (after 9 weeks). Although the delivery time was much longer than expected, the quality is quite reasonable; especially considering the incredibly low price.
I ordered 6 boards in total (3 each of two different designs) and the total cost was $150NZD ($123USD) inc. delivery. So overall a good experience
MakePCB had the longest lead time of all of them, after 9 weeks i would likely have forgotten the whole project. Did they at least send out regular status updates ?
Nice article! In the past I’ve had great success with http://www.pwcircuits.co.uk Never had a lead time of 9 weeks ! =O i usually have a 10 or 20 day service and can’t remember a time with it’s been late. Plus it’s always been to a good standard too, I’d recommend them !
Hi Alex, thanks for the link.
Pcbprice does not list batchpcb (from sparkfun), makepcb or dorkbotpdx so it is a bit skewed towards the more expensive services. Also, if i select “delivery term : 25 working days”, i only get one result : eurocircuits. I would assume someone allowing for a delivery term of 25 day would also accept fewer days and like to see more options. If i select 10 working days, i will actually get better offers from other services than the 25 days offer from eurocircuits. I like the idea of the price comparison tool, it just needs more tweaking.
look at http://www.caringcircuit.com/fab-pcb-price-qt-1.html, they have a detailed price table with all kinds of pcb and special technology prices listed.
I would like to add http://www.caringcircuit.com, who is expert in small and medium pcb service and they have many free service.
if you are talking about cheap PCB, ALLPCB.com from China must be recommended.
It is a platform of hundreds of PCB manufacturers, where you can always find the most fit pcb manufaturers according to price, quality and delivery time.
Some prototype PCB only costs $10!
you can visit http://www.allpcb.com/
I have used Seeed Studio Fusion https://www.seeedstudio.com/fusion_pcb.html a few times in the past. They are not quite the cheapest but still excellent value, and for that little bit extra they do a better job than most.