The math I did was pretty basic. BOM*quantity + mold cost. Those are sort of the basic knobs you can fiddle with. Not all molds are equal. I was just talking with someone last week who was going to 3d print one of the housings for a component he's designing, since the quantities are low, but found a molding technique that's low quality but simple, and he said it was maybe an order of magnitude cheaper than anything I was familiar with, so learning about molding processes can allow you to design products with a cheaper upfront cost there. I think he said this mold he was looking at was like on the order of hundreds of dollars, instead of thousands of dollars that I typically expect.
BOM reduction can be tricky. Lowering your BOM makes more sense the larger your production runs, but when selecting components I tend to sort by price, then find the cheapest component that satisfies my needs. Of course, a more expensive component may allow you to skip other related circuitry, giving a cheaper overall build, so diving into datasheets is important.
Quantity is the other thing you have some control over, but lower quantity batches have higher per item costs. Setting up a pick and place for a single board takes the same amount of time as setting one up for a larger run. If your quantities are low enough eventually setup fees are likely to start being a bigger percentage. Quantity also effects BOM costs. You can easily pay 2x as much for a component at low volumes, so you may not actually save as much as you think you will.
I agree with you that 30k isn't cheap. But if you look at things historically, we've finally reached a price point for hardware, that you don't need to be a big business to even think about having consumer quality electronics. Apple started with kits 40 years ago and took investor money pretty early if I recall my history correctly. Today I expect it to be easier to bootstrap a hardware company since there's more infrastructure around bootstrapping. I've seen successful products that won't do a production run until they have a certain amount of preorders. But hardware is just always going to be fundamentally more expensive than software
BOM reduction can be tricky. Lowering your BOM makes more sense the larger your production runs, but when selecting components I tend to sort by price, then find the cheapest component that satisfies my needs. Of course, a more expensive component may allow you to skip other related circuitry, giving a cheaper overall build, so diving into datasheets is important.
Quantity is the other thing you have some control over, but lower quantity batches have higher per item costs. Setting up a pick and place for a single board takes the same amount of time as setting one up for a larger run. If your quantities are low enough eventually setup fees are likely to start being a bigger percentage. Quantity also effects BOM costs. You can easily pay 2x as much for a component at low volumes, so you may not actually save as much as you think you will.
I agree with you that 30k isn't cheap. But if you look at things historically, we've finally reached a price point for hardware, that you don't need to be a big business to even think about having consumer quality electronics. Apple started with kits 40 years ago and took investor money pretty early if I recall my history correctly. Today I expect it to be easier to bootstrap a hardware company since there's more infrastructure around bootstrapping. I've seen successful products that won't do a production run until they have a certain amount of preorders. But hardware is just always going to be fundamentally more expensive than software