Earlier this month I ordered some PCBs. Due to the tariffs OSH park was actually a viable competitor for small batch runs. I've also found them to be higher quality than PCB way
OSHPark is a nonstarter for many workflows because they don't do assembly. I can't do anything with a plain PCB!
And for me, I'd rather do my own assembly than pay $1400 for five boards from Circuithub that I can get from JLCPCB for $20 or OSHPark for $50.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy, as you could pay ~$200 to get them assembled by one of the Chinese PCBA services.
For simple-to-medium boards you can assemble it yourself... No help if you're making a motherboard or whatever though.
Downside to this: it takes a long time, I have to source the parts myself, and I can't separate design or programming errors from soldering errors. (There will be many of those) I have not figured out a system to So: Having JLC do the assembly is a no-brainer for the projects I've done.
Agree with this. I used to do my own assembly almost as a point of pride, but the Chinese shops will do it so cheap now that you are really just torturing yourself to no purpose. (It’s fun the first few times, but gets old pretty quick.)
Their pcbs are too thin and the finish is annoying (I have to file off the tabs. Come on.)