Hi guys,

For a small prototyping project I am looking for an affordable service
that would mount some SMT components for me on a pcb that I provide.

We are talking about a board smaller than 2''x2'' , the smallest ic package
msop-10 and i am planning to make maybe 10 of these.

Does anyone know of a service provider which is prototyping "friendly", i.e. no high cost setup costs or other budget busters ?

I am guessing that it would be manually assembled, i am ok with that for this stage of the project.

Thanks in advance,
Lenny

 

The problem is there is always a big chunk of time and effort to set up the project and they need to be payed for that.

We always got a better price when we got the prototype boards and "build" done through the same vendor. But we always got at least several thousand small boards done, so that helped spread the NRE cost over the boards. The NRE (setup) cost is the same regardless of quantity. Getting ten pieces done is going to be very pricey per unit cost.

When we had small PCBs fabricated, the price was the same for ten pieces or 100 because they had to make them on a standard "panel" and that's how many boards came out.