What does it cost to develop a product?

TL;DR

Low-volume is “less” effort and will cost less. High-volume is high effort. Tooling for mass-production takes extra time to source, engineer, and validate. Not only do you have the cost of the tooling, but also the cost of the added engineering time.

Product Development Cost

When it comes to product development costs, it's no secret that they can vary greatly. One of our customers once remarked, "I've never seen anyone do this for less than a million dollars." While they weren't entirely wrong, the ever-connected world we live in today has opened up new possibilities, allowing us to achieve impressive outcomes for significantly less. In fact, we've seeing good results with budgets as low as $200,000.

We provide a premium customer-centric service. The cheapest path will be to work with an over-seas ODM (Original Design Manufacturing) to white label (rebrand) an existing product. However, our customers are typically looking for a more custom and personalized end product. We can help with your complex development projects without compromising on quality. We provide a premium “Designed in America” experience.

Each project is unique and the costs to complete the project will also be. The non-tangible deliverables such as creative choices, engineering new technology, and feature creep are the expenses that we can’t predict until completed. We provide our customers with estimates for engineering, and we are often accurate, but the “never been done before” nature of the work will sometimes take multiple attempts to get right. We will work with you at the start of the project to help understand the cost and risks involved.

How to Estimate the Cost

Tooling costs are more predictable. Injection molding, for example, is internationally standardized in such a way that we know the approximant cost per tool, and cost per part. A quality injection mold will often cost between $8,000 and $40,000. Our customer’s typically see an average of $12,000 per mold. The lower end of the range would be typical for a commodity level part. The higher end range is what you would see for an optical part or premium design. Sometimes we can fit more than one part per mold, however, we recommend budgeting one mold per part.

Here is a good rule to help you budget for the unpredictable costs: Simply multiply the total tooling cost by 2 for a non-tech product or multiply by 4 for a tech product. This will only get you in the ballpark, we use a much more complicated formula with our proposals. We take into account research, NRE, prototyping, a bit of flexibility for creative changes along the way.

Example: [ budget = 12,000 x (tooled part count) x 2 ]

Feel free to reach out if you would like a more accurate estimate for your project.