Author: Bob

PCBWay has been in our fabrication price calculator for a long time. Today, we have added them to our PCB assembly calculator as well.

We’re very excited to announce our newest feature: smart Order buttons. If you click the green Go to Order Page button in the price results for ALLPCB, you will, as before, go to their quote form. But now, when you get there, you will see that the quote form has already been filled out with your board’s specifications! Not only does this save you time and effort in completing your order, but it has the added benefit (especially for Americans) of converting the size of your board into millimeters. (ALLPCB’s site asks for the size of your board in millimeters, whereas some people think of their board’s size in terms of inches).

We’d like to thank ALLPCB for their cooperation in implementing this feature. We’ve discussed smart Order buttons with manufacturers before, but ALLPCB is the first to work with us to implement them.

ALLPCB has been in our fabrication price calculator for a few months now. Today, we have added them to our PCB assembly calculator as well.

We’ve just added ALLPCB to our Fabrication price comparison list. ALLPCB is an unusual company: when you do a search for prices on their site, it returns the results from several different Chinese factories. You can then choose which factory to order from, although ALLPCB still handles the ordering process.

When PCBShopper shows you a price from ALLPCB, it will be from the factory offering the lowest price that meets your schedule (as specified in PCBShopper’s “Boards arrive in…” field).

By popular request, we have added a new PCB specification: board thickness. You can now specify the thickness of your board, choosing from 0.6, 0.8, 1.0. 1.2, 1.6 (the default), or 2.0 mm. We hope you find this useful.

We’ve added more solder mask colors to our list: black matte, green matte, and transparent. Not many manufacturers offer these colors, but we’ll help you find the ones that do.

Solder mask color is usually an aesthetic choice, and is more of a “want” than a “must have”. And so when a manufacturer does not offer the requested color, we still show the manufacturer’s price, typically for boards with a green solder mask (although if you requested black matte and a manufacturer offers black, we’ll show you that price). We flag the price with a warning sign to let you know it’s not in your requested color.

We hope you find this useful.

A while back, Dirty PCBs changed their web site and PCBShopper was no longer able to get prices from them. We have now updated our code to use their new site and Dirty PCBs is once again appearing in our price comparison calculator.

Unfortunately, their new web site no longer allows us to get shipping costs, and so PCBShopper will show estimated shipping costs for Dirty PCB orders.

Seeed Studio was one of the first PCB manufacturers on PCBShopper. Today, we’ve added them to our PCB assembly list as well. Seeed provided a straightforward API to fetch assembly prices which made them easy to add.

Seeed’s online form combines PCB manufacturing with assembly, whereas PCBShopper prices them separately. So if you want Seeed to assemble boards that they did not manufacture, you might need to contact them directly.

Sunstone has made significant changes to their quote form. We need to rewrite PCBShopper’s interface to accommodate it. We expect to do this within a couple of weeks. Until then, we have disabled price quotes from Sunstone on PCBShopper.

We have disabled Dirty PCBs on PCBShopper. Their web site changed and it appears there is no longer a way to get shipping information from their site. We will work on this and try to come up with a solution.