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My experience was similar when I was doing a lot of cloning 15 years ago: We would routinely send tubes to a commercial sequencing service. How Plasmidsaurus competes against those other services is indeed the more interesting question.

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Really hard for them to compete at certain institutions. Some of these sequencing reps show up every afternoon to collect the days samples. Prices are so low that margins are probably tracing paper thin. Then some places will even have their own sequencing core facility offering all of that service at cost with even better turnaround, sometimes that day.

When I did the same, also 15 years ago, the lab on campus would only Sanger sequence my insert - and for targets larger than ~600bp I also had to include internal sequencing primers (that had to be ordered separately, shipped, etc). Plasmidsaurus will return the entire plasmid sequence so you can verify it is intact, you don't have to provide any internal sequencing primers, simple repeats will be more accurately sequenced, and you can just pop some tubes in a padded mailer in the post at room temperature.

I'm no longer doing wet bench work but Plasmidsaurus seems like a service I'd happily use.

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