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Comment by johndmcmaster | Hacker News Reader

Hi there! CTO of Labsmore here. Pricing is hard :) There is a lot that goes into the final price, especially once the other components, calibration, and overhead is factored in. Its our first time selling a product like this and would love input from others on how they arrive at sticker prices and PMF for commercial products.

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Oh absolutely, I just couldn't help pointing out the little detail I noticed; given this is HN an all.

In my opinion, if you've shipped 2 or more units at the given prices... You've actually priced it right for your target market!

We have! And a few larger group buys / enterprise customers in the pipeline. We started out selling more expensive Mitutoyo systems (quality but expensive Japanese optics) and sold a few of those. But feedback from customers was that if we could do 80% of what that system does and get it on a credit card it would be very interesting to them (greatly simplifies purchasing flow). But at the same time distributors don't want to carry them because they loose margin over selling $30-200k comps which means we need to adapt more of a "DTC" approach than we were originally planning. So working on upping our sales / marketing game.

In my experience, for products that aren't medical devices, fighter jets, etc. The rule of thumb is 30-40%. 30-40% of the final cost to the customer is what you should be shooting to have your COGS leaving your factory.

Thanks! Yeah that's roughly inline with our calculations / how we priced things.

If we want to get the final price lower we need to switch to more basic components or tighter integration with suppliers. But we've been avoiding that under our premise having a system that can be purchased with a company credit card (say 5k or 10k limit) is the main requirement. Would love more feedback on how important that is for people's purchasing decisions. And even then if we lowered the cost of the chassis we might instead use that to improve the optics/camera following the "credit card purchase" philosophy.

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