Quoted from JethroP:Exactly. Andrew sells a very nice, high quality board (kit) for $30. I've seen a few in machines and I've put one kit together. $30 is such a great price. You asked if you should add your kit to the marketplace. I am suggesting you add it if you offer a better price to what is already available. Doesn't seem like there is much profit to be made at $30, but I suppose you could make it worthwhile with high sales volume. I wonder how many new rectifier boards are sold each year? Can you answer?
Sorry for the late reply its been a busy week. So in response to the first suggestion offering a better price then $30. So the Nvram and PinHead boards are very different products in terms of features and design. It looks like his goal was to provide the pinball community an affordable option and it looks like he accomplished that goal. My goal is to provide the pinball community with a board that has great features and the best components currently available and I believe I have accomplished that goal as well. As for price there are a couple ways to approach this. Lets say this were a mass market item and I was able to sell thousands of units a year. If that were the case I would be willing to try and beat the lowest price because you can still profit due to high volume sales. However, that is not the case here as we are in a niche market. So at best I would only be willing to match it, but only if I were to sell a similar product, which I currently do not have. I noticed that he charges $5 shipping, meaning the board cost is actually $35, so lets use that price for comparison. I plan to offer free shipping if I decide to offer a kit. It appears the Nvram kit doesn't have an accessory pack sold with it. Can someone please confirm whether this is actually the case or not? My board will include an accessory pack, as I believe it is important to install with the kit because the old connector casings are commonly burnt and the original metal connectors only have one side versus the trifuricon molex connectors I use which have 3 sides. This will drastically improve reliability as this was one of the main weak points in the original design. I believe most companies selling the accessory packs are charging $10 last time I looked. This would bring the price point up to $45. As for components and features my board cost will be higher due to using higher grade components and additional components from the added features. Added features include - All rectifiers are 35 amp with heatsinks, clip on test points, LED voltage indicators, ground lug and fuse cover. So realistically I believe $50 seems like a good price point based on the comparisons. Maybe $45 if I decide to be competitive. I could achieve the $30 price point if I removed the added features and used cheaper components. However, doing so would just mean we have two manufactures selling the same product, so I think it would be better to give the pin community the option to choose between an affordable option and a higher cost option with added features. As for your last question on how many rectifiers are sold each year I wouldn't know the answer to that as there are probably 10 manufactures making the board currently. When I started there were only 3 maybe 4. I think about 250k machines were made that use this board and lets just say half of them still exist that's 125k potential sales which gives you a rough idea of what the market would be.
