We recently refactored our pricing scheme, because, well, it got too complicated.
So why change a winning team?
If a price calculation is hard to explain, you have a problem. If you need a programm to calculate your price, you have an even bigger problem. So, we went back to square one and discussed what made calculating a price so hard and found two key issues:
1) We had a flat-price per project that was calculated based on the project’s dimensions but never took quantity into account
If you were to purchase units in a quantity larger than three, our pricing was horrendously expensive and not competitive at all. While customers did decide for this, we believe that those profits weren’t fair, and should be spent elsewhere (e.g. on another prototype).
2) This pricing approach lead to an escalator-type pricing model because if you are to just charge by a flat cm^2 price, you’d be fair to small designs while larger designs are extemely expensive.
Hence we had to derive steps which could only be calculated by an algorithm. Since we don’t provide a calculator for PCB prices, you’d have to upload a design. While this is nice for us, you’d have to upload something you are not yet sure about whether you’d order it. So essentially a lose-lose situtation where you’d have to spend time waiting and we’d have to spend computing power to process your design.
Basically, the core essence of these two issues were because we charged the project’s dimensions.
So what did we change?
It’s actually such an obvious choice, we facepalmed 
:person_facepalming: ourselves for not doing it earlier. Instead of charging for the project’s dimensions (and hence having to come up with a complicated pricing scheme), we changed to factor in the required, i.e. used dimension, of the order instead. So our pricing model now looks like this
y = b + m * x
Where b is a fixed price of 10.20 Euro, m a variable fee for the technology per cm^2 and x the amount of cm^2 used for your order. Check our wiki for details. By the way, the pricing ruby gem on Github has gotten less difficult to understand, too, and is still there for you to check our pricing. This should make larger quantity orders for all ranges of pcb projects a lot more affordable as well. Also the adjustments let to price improvements of smaller to medium sized boards.
It’s official now, no testing anymore.
Cheers
