I agree. (below)
> >Hear, hear. I'm in the contract manufacturing
> >business, and we turn away lots of potential business because we don't
> >provide a free prototype
>
> It's one thing for electronic manufacturers to provide free samples of
> 50-cent ICs to prospective users -- it's usually cheaper to give them away
> than to bill and pay for them, on both sides of the transaction.
> Mini-Circuits is the only company I can think of that doesn't sample
> liberally and nobody minds -- because it's EASY do buy direct from them in
> any quantity.
>
> It's a completely different thing to expect an engineering firm to develop
> AND build a prototype "on spec" -- without any guarantee of an order, or
> any idea what the size of the order might be.
>
> I wouldn't ever do prototyping for free either. But if I had a reasonably
> firm business plan with predictable future orders, I would ALWAYS share
> enough information with a potential supplier from whom I needed a
> prototype, so that they could "run the numbers" and see whether the cost
> of developing a prototype could be reasonably folded into future
> production. That's something the supplier has to know before committing
> to a prototype or a manufacturing run.
>
> There's more to business than just finding the cheapest price. Case in
> point? Alpha's attempt to move its manufacturing to Eastern Europe. Only
> problem was -- nobody bothered to tell the factory that the amplifiers
> actually had to WORK.
>
> Jim N6OTQ
>
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