> Designing a PCB and sending it off to fab is surprisingly accessible and feels like a super power.
That may very well be the case if you live in the US, Germany, France or the UK. Go anywhere else and it's a different story. To give you a bit of context, there is a shop that makes them 15 minutes walk from my place. The prices are ridiculous. If you ever need to go through 3 prototypes to fix some mistakes, you are looking at 3-400 bucks for a total of 9 pcb's. And while you can order from abroad easily, shipping costs+the additional time you need to wait makes the price tags identical. Meaning it's cheaper to get a laser cutter/engraver or an sla 3d printer and make them at home. Sure, they turn our a bit sloppy, no matter how much effort you put into them but it's worth it at the end of the day. Kind of a shame that laser cutter, sla printers, CNC's have become dirt cheap. I would have imagined that some sort of democratization of pcb manufacturing would have happened by now but here we are...