Why the minimum order is five boards, not one
By INDiPCB ·
You need one board. We make you five and charge you for five, and that looks like a rule invented to sell more. It is not — it is what the price is actually made of.
This is the question we are asked most often, so here is the honest answer, including the numbers.
Look at our own price list first
A prototype board from us is ₹150 each, five pieces, ₹750. That price is the same for a board 25 mm square and a board 100 mm square.
| Board size | Copper area | Price for 5 |
|---|---|---|
| 25 × 25 mm | 6 cm² | ₹750 |
| 50 × 50 mm | 25 cm² | ₹750 |
| 100 × 100 mm | 100 cm² | ₹750 |
If you were paying for material, that table would be impossible. You are not. You are paying for a sequence of work that happens once per design, before a single board exists — and that work costs the same whether we then make one board or fifty.
What happens before your first board is made
An engineer opens your Gerbers and does CAM: checking the layers register to each other, that the drill file matches the pads, that nothing sits closer to the edge than the router can cut, that your smallest track will survive etching. This is a person, at a screen, for as long as it takes. It is the same hour whether the order is for one board or fifty.
Then the job is tooled. Your board is stepped and repeated into an array on a production panel, with fiducials, tooling holes and test coupons added around it. A drill program is generated and proved out — every hole size sorted into tool changes, in an order that keeps the spindle moving and the entry material clean.
Then imaging. Each copper layer needs its artwork: either film that is printed, registered and inspected, or a direct-imaging exposure written per panel. Solder mask needs its own artwork. So does the silkscreen legend. Every one of those is prepared for your design, not for your quantity.
Then the panel goes through the wet line: cleaning, resist lamination, exposure, development, etch, strip, oxide, solder mask coat and cure, surface finish, legend, rout, electrical test. Around twenty stages, most of them chemical baths.
The chemistry does not know how many boards you wanted
This is the part people find surprising. Those baths are dosed, heated, filtered and analysed by the panel. A panel carrying one board of yours consumes the same etchant, the same developer, the same rinse water and the same plating chemistry as a panel carrying fifty — and it generates the same volume of spent solution to be treated and disposed of.
Effluent from a PCB line is regulated waste. It is neutralised, the metals are recovered, and the treated water is tested before it leaves. That cost falls per panel processed. Making one board does not make one board’s worth of waste; it makes a panel’s worth.
Why one board is riskier than five
Your board passes through twenty-odd handling and chemical stages. A small proportion of boards are scrapped along the way — a scratch through the resist, a mark on the mask, a fault caught at electrical test. That is normal manufacturing, not failure, and every fab builds a margin for it.
With five boards, one scrap still leaves you a complete order. With one board, a single defect means there is nothing to ship, and the entire job — CAM, tooling, drill program, artwork, twenty process stages — has to be run again from the start, at our cost. A one-piece minimum would not be a smaller order. It would be a coin toss on repeating all of it.
So what would one board actually cost?
Almost the same as five. Take the setup out and the material left over is a few rupees of laminate and copper. We could sell you one board for perhaps ₹600 instead of ₹750 — and you would rightly feel cheated, because you would be paying 80% of the price for 20% of the boards.
Five is not a hurdle in front of the price. Five is what the price already buys.
What the other four are for
Nobody who has assembled a prototype thinks of them as spares.
- The first one you will damage. Reworking a fine-pitch part with a hot iron lifts pads. It happens to everyone, and the board is dead when it does.
- You will want one populated in stages — power section first, checked, then the rest. That is much easier on a second board than on the one you have already finished.
- Keep one bare. When something behaves strangely, an unpopulated board is how you check what the copper actually does, and how you confirm a footprint before you commit the next revision.
- One for the enclosure. Drilling a case, checking connector alignment and test-fitting a panel are all better done with a board you do not mind scratching.
- One to send. A colleague, a client, a competition entry — having a spare assembled board is the difference between demonstrating a thing and describing it.
Boards get cheaper per piece as quantity goes up, because the setup is spread further. But it never disappears, which is why nobody in this industry sells a single prototype board at a fifth of the price of five. The setup is the product. The copper is nearly free.