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> It is only 6.9 dollars > probably for $10+shipping You could honestly sell it for $30-40 and it would still be a pretty good deal. Meanwhile Blue Robotics b

> It is only 6.9 dollars > probably for $10+shipping You could honestly sell it for $30-40 and it would still be a pretty good deal. Meanwhile Blue Robotics be like "that'll be $175 plus $50 shipping and customs fees as a percentage of that $175 fam" https://bluerobotics.com/store/comm-control-power/tether-interface/ethswitch/ https://bluerobotics.com/store/comm-control-power/tether-int... God, everything they sell is overpriced to the point of insanity. They could really use some proper competition.

numpad0 2y ago
Low volume hardware pricing always look infuriatingly high, but they also start looking hopelessly low once you've dipped toes into it and tried multiplying your spent development man-hours with McDonalds wages or tolerable unit price by expected sales volume. I've never heard of Blue Robotics, but I doubt that $175 product ships 1k units/year, and even if they did, that's $170k revenue, or 2x entry level engineers salary worth of raw recovered cash before factoring in any expenditure whatsoever, let alone taxes and HR. It probably hardly feeds one, and that's based on an optimistic hypotheticals that they ship a thousand of that product every year. Large scale multinational corporations ship in orders of million units. That makes it way easier to amortize non-recurring engineering and ship small products virtually at cost.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  I mean sure, I understand that. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. BR are really well known to anyone dealing with ROVs or AUVs, but that's not exactly the average person. Commercial consumer hardware R&D is mostly a fool's errand these days, since if it's something that's worth producing and sells there will be clones that work just as well available almost immediately. I'm not sure how say, Adafruit, sells anything at all to be honest, anything they make gets perfectly cloned and sold on Aliexpress for a tenth of the price. I guess going extremely niche and overpriced is one way to work around it.

numpad0 2y ago

Low volume hardware pricing always look infuriatingly high, but they also start looking hopelessly low once you've dipped toes into it and tried multiplying your spent development man-hours with McDonalds wages or tolerable unit price by expected sales volume. I've never heard of Blue Robotics, but I doubt that $175 product ships 1k units/year, and even if they did, that's $170k revenue, or 2x entry level engineers salary worth of raw recovered cash before factoring in any expenditure whatsoever, let alone taxes and HR. It probably hardly feeds one, and that's based on an optimistic hypotheticals that they ship a thousand of that product every year. Large scale multinational corporations ship in orders of million units. That makes it way easier to amortize non-recurring engineering and ship small products virtually at cost.

moffkalast 2y ago
I mean sure, I understand that. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. BR are really well known to anyone dealing with ROVs or AUVs, but that's not exactly the average person. Commercial consumer hardware R&D is mostly a fool's errand these days, since if it's something that's worth producing and sells there will be clones that work just as well available almost immediately. I'm not sure how say, Adafruit, sells anything at all to be honest, anything they make gets perfectly cloned and sold on Aliexpress for a tenth of the price. I guess going extremely niche and overpriced is one way to work around it.