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Dec 31, 2023Liked by Nava Whiteford

Great analysis as always. I wanted to point out that COGS includes -- on top of the material costs listed above -- the salaries of employees who produce/assembled the product from the raw materials, as well as overhead costs associated with rent, utilities, maintenance, etc in the facilities where the product is produced. It's not clear to me whether you are aware of this (I wasn't aware of it initially either until I took an accounting class). So the COGS line item ends up being significantly more than the sum of the components' list prices.

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Right, the above is closer to a BOM cost.

However in this case I don’t really expect the fully assembled cost (even contact assembly) to be far from the BOM. Assembly is a matter of PCB assembly (cheap) and screwing the PCB into a box. I’d personally expect this to be doable for <$300, maybe much less.

Non-recurring Design/Engineering costs will likely be high however.

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