There's often been mention of the price of PCB's from the Chinese manufacturers, in this case JLC PCB.
Now while the boards are cheap (and excellent quality), the cost of getting them from China isn't
I order quite a lot of boards from work, and I've recently used the last of the hundred boards I last ordered for one of our products, so took the opportunity to change the board slightly - as such, I only ordered 5 boards to test, rather than 100 to find out I've messed up, and the boards are useless.
The boards are well under their 100mm x 100mm special offer price of $2, so it seemed a shame to pay $20+ to get them delivered.
Normally we pay for DHL delivery, because we like them to arrive quickly (usually a week from order, or even 5/6 days), but in this case there's no rush, as we're already waiting for other parts, and we've got a stock of 'mostly' built units waiting for those parts. So I went for the cheapest delivery offered - although this only seems available on low cost, or perhaps low weight?, orders.
So this is the actual cost, cut and pasted from the invoice at JLC PCB.
Merchandise Total: USD $2.00 (£1.58)
Shipping: USD $1.55 (£1.22)
Subtotal: USD $3.55 (£2.80)
Import Taxes(20%): USD $0.71 (£0.56)
Grand Total: USD $4.26 (£3.36)
So, £3.36 for 5 boards delivered from China, including UK VAT paid (20%), you can't really grumble at that
I placed the order on 8th November, and according to the tracking they are in the UK, have cleared customs, and are in the hands of the local carrier, I imagine they will arrive tomorrow, or even this afternoon.
For a comparison, the 100 similar boards I ordered previously cost this:
Merchandise Total: USD $52.10 (£41.04)
Shipping: USD $67.32 (£53.03)
Subtotal: USD $119.42 (£94.07)
Import Taxes(20%): USD $23.89 (£18.82)
Grand Total: USD $143.31 (£112.89)
To be fair, that works out at £1.13 per board, compared to £0.67 per board for the 5 on the special offer with slow postage. It is annoying though when the postage is more than the goods