(Brett has working girls 
)
So then the advice is:-
So if the board doesn’t work out, I should be able to scavenge the major (i.e. expensive) components from one that is not working.
Send your BOM and Gerber’s to MyroPCB and ask for a quote.
I’ve used them loads of times and very good service. Very fast time to quote too and they do due diligence on your parts list to PCB layout to make sure no issues with parts.
Nothing to lose asking for a quote. They are well happy to do small runs. I’ve done as little as 4 PCB’s before.
Well he has been pimping…
Yes, order a stencil. Have a look at ALLPCB if you havent.
I can run a single board thru the PnP as 90% of my BOM’s are common which use reels that dont change on the PnP. Generating the PnP files from Altium or the like is a single click so for me PnP setup generally takes 5 mins.
2nd ALLPCB if you just want bare boards. Super low prices and very fast service.
The boards are 4 layer; Seeedstudio is the cheapest of them all but they take forever.
Only if you do a specific size maybe, but then when you add shipping…
eg.
Do a board say 110mm x 100 at seeed then the price jumps from $50 to $104 + shipping.
Same size from all PCB is $76 including DHL
Also seeed will charge extra for doing panels and v grooves etc.
I do lots of single board pnp 
@Mr_John_Smith, give AllPCB a try out next time. You can get your PCB’s as a panel or you can get them as single.
I just ordered 5 off 100 x 65mm 2 layer boards from AllPCB. $20 including shipping and 24 hour (working day) service. I used to use Seeed Studio but they did not do the board cutouts. Prior to AllPCB, I used DFRobot and they were good for board cutouts etc but took far longer and more expensive.
After calculating the costs, I realized that I forgot one important element: What if the boards work the first time?
So I placed an assembly order with AllPCB. We’ll see how that goes.
Those look good. I’d love to use them for population but I get stung badly on import costs. I do use them for all of my PCB’s these days. Great quality and super fast on 2 layer for the simple boards.
@Dave_McLaughlin, Stung? I could get hit with 29.5% tax when they arrive. How much do you get hit with?
Pretty much the same but can’t be over $1500 or need an import license. We pay 7.5% duty, 10% VAT and then 10% income tax. This gets applied to anything over $75.
You get charged income tax on things your import? Is that $1500 USD?
EDIT: I think I understand. You guys pay 10% income tax (we pay 25%), 7.5% duty (we pay 10%) and 10% vat (we pay 12.5%). There is no bottom level either, it is all taxable. Also we pay an additional 7% just because we purchased it from online (e.g. Amazon). It’s really a tax on the method of importation (airfreight via freight forwarder) but the intention is to tax online purchases.
Yes, US$1500 but we have to pay the duty etc in Rupiah at the customs rate.
Because of the high import taxes, much of my sales of systems supplied by a UK company are drop shipped. I could not afford to sell it otherwise. The import tax alone would kill it dead and leave no profit margin at all.
Drop shipping only works if the supplier builds the entire product ( in my case the whole machine) and the sends it to the customer. (Mass drop is an example of drop shipping then). Is that right?
Yes correct, and in my case I am shipping the final product to the end client. Many do this. I bought an OBD2 emulator from an Australian company and it was shipped direct from China.
