Designing your own board looks easy from the outside, but quickly turns out to take a lot of effort and time as you work through PCB design, first boards, initi

Designing your own board looks easy from the outside, but quickly turns out to take a lot of effort and time as you work through PCB design, first boards, initial bring-up, tweaks, new boards, EOL notice one of your components, slight redesign, and finally you're headed of to (pre-)certifications only to find you need to fix something there. This assumes that your SoC vendor actually cares about you as a customer and provides you all documentation, erratas, and EOL notices in a timely manner and not considers you a liability that due to small volumes (<1M) will never earn someone in the SoC company any real bonuses. I'm making a living developing big and small embedded systems for customers as a software developer, so I see this mostly from the outside, and depending on the experience of your team and how good your contacts to your component suppliers are, you may be able to speed up the process. But for sure it takes a lot of effort to get to the stage where you have what this $49 SOM gives you. $49 times 10k units is quickly eaten into, and then have you have to consider what value you put on time to market.