Dirty PCBs Reviews

Purchased lots of boards form DirtyPCBs over the last several years.

Last year I ordered a 50 of a pcb and they cut the PCB on a silk screen line and only sent me pcb halves! When I contacted them and told them the size did not match what I entered and half the board was missing they tried to tell me my artwork was inferior and would not make it right. I was otherwise happy with them and continued to use them.

Early this year I placed a protopack order for roughly $23 with shipping to Florida. A few days later they called me (I was very surprised) and said they needed an additional $10 for shipping in order to get them by DHL sooner than 4-6 weeks and I agreed to the additional charge. Funny enough I had placed the same pcb on order from JLCPCB for only about $22, with no additional fee, and they arrived 3 days before the Dirty PCBs.

I will never use them again! PCBWay and JLCPCB are too easy and inexpensive and I have heard great things about Seeed Studio PCBs. There is a lot of competition in this space. DirtyPCBs need to up their game and keep up with the competition.

I've ordered a _lot_ of boards from DirtyPCBs and for the most part they've been perfectly usable - I've had a few with poor quality silkscreen but electrically they've been sound and have worked perfectly well once built up.



My major beef with them is their shipping services - forget about using their untracked service; I've had three consignments disappear into the ether and with no tracking info and the like you've just got to suck it up. Tracked shipping is marginally better, but as I type this I've got a bunch of boards which have been 'arriving in the UK' for the past 3 weeks. Courier shipping is available, which is the best choice if you want to get your boards in a timely manner, but it offsets any price advantages.



That aside, they deserve props for the 'protopack' - I've never received less than 10 boards, and the last couple of orders have contained 13(!). You pays your money and you takes your chance.

I used DirtyPCB's for my final capstone project. I had placed a rush order for 10cm x 10cm and received great customer service and quality boards. I ordered black 1.2mm they all looked good and I had a few extra boards.

I have placed another order with them with white solder mask with vias so we'll see how this goes.

I am buying form this Dirty PCBs for over 4 years. It appears that they are using different manufacturing sources. Quality varies. Sometimes it's OK, sometimes trash. Recent built have some VIAs without metallization that caused major failures. but they are cheap if you need small quantities cheap and fast

Rudely canceled my order after they said it was in production since their site lets you order single boards but on their about me page it says 10 minimum. This should have been stated when ordering.. Will not order from again.

My last order (similar to the two others i reviewed here) was noticably less in quality: small smd pins with a fine pitch weren't all equal (some pretty wide with hardly spacing to their neighbours, some pretty thin), the silk screen was of lesser quality (pretty bad on the bottom of the pcb , on some places the small text wasn't readable...); and not sure if i should call this good or bad: on one of the 10 pcbs they had manually applied some soldermask to make sure i actually got 10 pcbs of my protopack. it's nice to get 10, but to then see part of the silkscreen covered by a manual soldermask job ^^'.
All in all still happy these pcbs are working, but seeing my 2 previous orders, i'm a bit disappointed by this one :(.
but it lives up to their promise of course: cheap prototype pcb's that are functional (and seeing as it was again 15 boards separated by mousebites, it's still *very* cheap :).

I order a 10x10cm protopack of 10 pcb's, 2 layers. It consisted of 13 distinct small pcb's connected via tabs & mousebites.

All in, it cost 26 dollar (incl shipping to europe). processing time was less (sent the files on sunday, shipment was on friday), shipping (cheapest option) took 3 weeks. The result is 12 of such panels, everything looking great 🙂 (wouldn't call these dirty pcb's at all).

It's too bad that they don't allow panelizing for 4 layer pcb's, but if you're making small 2 layer pcb's, it's a great deal :).

Ive ordered about 5 designs, 200 pcbs total, everything flawless.



There are a very few strange restrictions but overall was a game chager for me.

Order a protopack of 10 small pcbs (50x20mm). the processing was a bit slow (2 weeks between going into production and actual sending), but everything went ok (and for 15$, i don't mind it going a bit slower). in the end i received 11 pcbs (of which 1 had some small damage to the silk screen).

Afterwards i learned that my vias were a bit smaller than they should have been (and probably quite some lines on my silk screen were also thinner than their min line width, kicad defaults to 0.12 mm on most lines, they ask for 0.15mm).

But they probably altered it where needed & just made a perfect working board :).



very pleased :), made a second order now (where i tried to respect all rules i now know of 🙂 ).

I ordered a two different PCB's from Dirty PCB's - the first one came back perfect. The second order from them was a tiny PCB with 12 holes for two components - none of the holes where as specified 🙁



So I could throw 1000 PCB's into the thrash bin.



I tried to solve this with Dirty PCB's - but no solution a month later => I'm not going to use them again.