4 ms·

I don't know why or how on earth this costs so much to make. * Speaker? $5 for something decent enough to work. Find AmazonBasics supplier, crank that up to $1

• ljk 11y ago
  what confuses me is it costs so much, but they want to make the cooler _look_ like any other $30 cooler? are people throwing money at this just because it has some gimmick features?
  • joshmn 11y ago
    Where's Elon when you need him?
• makomk 11y ago
  > Plastic parts? I don't know. Can't be that much, can it? Yes, it really can be that much. Making ordinary plastic parts involves electro-machining very precisely shaped chunks of metal designed to optimise the flow of the hot plastic injected into them at high pressure and make sure it cools properly without too much shrinkage or warping and then ejects reliably. It's expensive. Since this is a cooler that needs a foamed plastic insulating layer as well, I imagine it's even more complicated.
• ghaff 11y ago
  Don't forget the plastic plates! I can actually understand why the costs might be so high if they're doing custom parts. The per-unit cost might be low but setting up molds etc. could be quite expensive. (Though that doesn't quite square with the claim of needing more money to complete an additional lot.) In general, this seems like the sort of thing which really doesn't make a lot of sense in a Kickstarter context. I get the fact that it's cute in a certain gimicky sort of way but if I actually wanted something like this personally, I'd buy whatever size cooler at whatever price point made sense to me and put together a nice kit with whatever other accessories I wanted.
• extrapickles 11y ago
  I bet a lot of the cost is the plastic, as the design I've seen from pictures would require fairly expensive molds as they would have to have moving parts (I wouldn't be surprised if the molds were $500k for just the body). Complex molds also need more time on the machine so the price per part goes up. Also, do to the size, there are fewer places with machines that big so the manufacturer has more leverage to get a higher rate. They could have also specified the wrong class of molding to make the coolers as they could have hired the wrong engineer to design it for them. They could have specified traditional injection molding rather than blow molding or other techniques more suitable for large cheap plastic objects. Injection molding machines that can do small parts (dozen cm square at most) are very common, and time on them is cheap ($10k for mold + <$0.25/part). Large Machines (1m, also with a large draw) are rare, and the per-part price alone can make the $180 product impossible, as they would need the outer shell and the inner liner made on a large machine. I would not be surprised if they were charged $100 for the two pieces after yield was factored in. Also, the molds probably would take 6 months to make, which pretty much is the timeline they promised the units. Making 2 large pieces of steel have a even, thin gap with moving parts is non-trivial and expensive. A good comparison for how much they would have to charge would be how much 2 knock-off pelican cases the size of a cooler would cost (hint: more than $180).