> Now, this may seem like a silly question with an obvious answer,
> and a fortunate position to be in, but it's left me very undecided
>
> I'm trying to put a price on a product that's ready for small-medium
> manufacture. It's based around a fairly simple F628 program that
> took around 20 (productive) hours to write and about NZ$47 worth
> of components. Hand assembly takes 4-5 hours

etc

Your friendly local PC fixit man will charge $60/hr if you are very very
lucky and 80-100/hr if possible.
Electronic repair firms charge $80 - $120 /hr for repairs which to them are
often trivially easy. The cheapest lawyer you can find will cost around
$130 - $150/hr.

If you want to build up some "capital bow wave" so that you can buy the test
and development equipment that you would like (or need) and some limited
production equipment to make assembly jobs better and quicker, then
amotising some of this into your products seems to be no sin IF the market
will bear it. In this case the market apparently will. odds are the other
people are ripping people off. I'd suggest a price to start about half way
between your reasonable price and their selling price. You can always go
down later. Going up is often harder.

Let me see your new scope when you buy it :-). Tek is doing 12% off tradeins
until end of May

Tere is also the chance that you will be "left holding the baby" unless you
have a firm order paid in advance for your product. If not on this job then
on the next one. Funding a dgree of unpaid for R&D will also help you and
your customers long term.


        Russell McMahon

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