They’re not horribly expensive, and a decent turn around time. Their hole sizes are weird, but there are relatively easy fixes for that.

Batchpcb _is_ Sparkfun and its no secret at all that they send their orders to China. They make it easy for someone who only has 1 or 2 boards to do and is not in a time-pinch — and many people (probably not you) need much more handholding in doing something like this so there’s a community of people there who can help put together the mechanicals and other data for making a board. I did my first few with them and then felt I needed faster turn-around for my way of working (I’m impatient when I’m working on a fun project), so I started using other services that cost a bit more. The downside was I had to order many more boards than I would end up using.

Free-market sparky — you can use whoever you want. Not everyone makes a choice based on cost.

In a nutshell SFE fanboys have overrated their service a LOT.

Their turn around time is ridiculous we’re talking weeks even months here, and they don’t even care to say how much you have to wait, you have to figure that out yourself.

Their customer support is as crude as their website is and the online orders aren’t really up to date, some days they ship other they dont what is going on ?

I frankly don’t understand what is sooooo cool about them, their price is not the best out there, and they OUTSOURCE to china !!!

Other vendors like pcbcart will charge you the tooling service but I did my math and considering the options they offer it’s a good deal.

I’m quite disappointed with batchpcb but Im even more angry at people for overeating their service and making all us believe they are as cool as SFE, this is far from been the truth.

I would not consider batchpcb again for my pcb’s next time Im going to order straight from china.

Ben.

It’s dirt cheap as long as your board is less than 10cmx10cm.
They can do larger boards, but not as cheaply, unless you order in quantity.

Just out of curiousity, does anyone else have experience with Golden Phoenix? I placed an order with them about a month ago however i ran into numerous issues with their quality (routing done improperly and immersion gold started flaking off)

Nevertheless, I find others with a good impression and their prices is one of the best out there. Should I give them a try again?

And does anyone have any experience with JetPCB or PCB Universe, I’ve been hearing some good things. I’m on my final project before graduation and need some cheap 8-layer boards! Thinking about going with PCB Universe cause I’ve been getting some help from one of their designers.

Any advice would be welcomed! Thanks!

BTW, if you’re interested in putting some nice looking pictures of your gerbers up on your site have a look at http://www.circuitpeople.com. I created it as a free tool for visualizing PCB fabrication files. Just upload a zip of your Gerbers and the site immeadiately turns them into a set of high-fidelity images.

Here’s a sample: http://www.circuitpeople.com/ViewPackage.aspx?id=7c92e072-fe08-4522-8b47-f7d2c898368c