Hello! Kris here with some answers to the questions we have gotten from many of you about pricing. This is not a political post: we are simply shedding some light on the realities of producing products at this point in time.

The situation

Not going to lie, it’s pretty bleak. PCB prices have skyrocketed, along with increased minimum orders and longer lead times. By now, everyone knows that there are tariffs. While those are a pain point, there are others you probably don’t know about. 

We build all our products in Southern California, but we have to get a lot of parts from China; PCBs, ICs, microcontrollers, and passives like resistors and capacitors. In most cases there are no viable options to acquire these from other countries (or if there are, they are more expensive and the supply chain is less stable).

When the tariffs were first  announced, we sat down with our amazing contract manufacturer and agreed we would try to minimize the price increases however we could. Shortly after that, the tariff amount increased again. And then again. And then they were decreased, but only temporarily. This fluctuation makes it extremely difficult to know how much our raw materials will cost because a tariff rate is not locked in when we place an order. Rather, whatever the rate is when an order crosses the border is what we get hit with.

Did you know that your PCBs are made of gold? That’s not a non-sequiter, and the price of gold has gone up. It’s more than doubled since we started making modules in 2014, and it has really skyrocketed in 2025. This is contributing to the massive price increases we have seen in PCBs. 

A real number for context: we tried to reorder a module where the PCB in the past had cost ~$3 and the new price was $17. 

Our goals, amid chaos

We know this is a hard time for a lot of people, not just for those of us making things. Our goal has always been for our products to bring a lot of value, even when we are not the least expensive brand. We believe our platform modules and firmware updates for other products illustrate our commitment to this goal.

We can’t guarantee that we won’t need to increase our prices at some point in the future, but we’re working hard to minimize that and also delay it as long as possible.

How we are doing it

We have a multi-pronged strategy. Some of these changes will disappoint some of you, and for that we are sincerely sorry.

The bottom line is that we’re going to expedite end-of-lifeing some products, and we are going to stop offering silver panels. 

This may sound a little scary, so let’s go through what we’re doing and why.

First, we are holding prices steady at the moment, and will do so as long as possible.

Second, we’re evaluating if there are any redesigns we can do to bring prices down. We did this during the pandemic (redesigning every product, most of them twice). In this case, there are not a lot of changes we think we can make to reduce prices but if we can do it, we will.

Third, we are going to streamline the product line. We will not continue to make some of our older modules. Our flagship products like platforms, Univer Inter, Xer Mixa, and many others will remain in production, but look for more products to be discontinued. We’ll make these choices based on sales and the price of build on each. We may also need to only temporarily discontinue products and resurrect them if build prices come down. We can only build something if we can sell it for a price we think is a good value. These changes decrease the amount of money we have sitting in inventory on a shelf.

Finally, we have made the difficult decision to end-of-life silver panels. We sell a lot fewer of these, and silver panels increase our costs for a variety of reasons:

• We powdercoat black panels. This covers up all but the worst imperfections in a panel. Silver panels are not powder coated, so we end up rejecting a lot of them as duds. This is wasteful and also expensive. 

• We also now finish our silver panels with a process called bead blasting. This is more expensive than powder coating.

• We have a large product line, and having both black and silver panels effectively doubles it. Streamlining the product line will make things easier for retailers and for our production.

But I love silver

We know some of you are very much invested in silver panels. For now, almost everything is still available in silver, and if we have stock in silver, it will remain available (we don’t repanel things once they are built). For the long term, although we won’t sell silver modules, we plan to offer silver replacement panels for purchase separately for the foreseeable future. 

Again, we know that this will disappoint some of you so we are attempting to approach this with as much transparency as possible.

Bottom line

It’s a tough time in this industry. We’re having to make some changes but they are all in the service of keeping prices as low as possible and products in production as long as possible.