FCDEV3B price justification

[E:V:A]

Dear Mychaela,

I've been following your progress for years, and believe that what you
are doing is very noble, politically correct and useful for the mobile
enthusiast community. However, I believe you have reached a stepping
stone at which you need to consider some kind of external support. You
can't afford supporting your own project by your own, and your best
effort Calypso supporter community are cringing at the price of the
developer board. This at the time when one can get a fantastic SDR for
~$300 USD, that can do any kind of communications at any frequency
between 0 - 3 GHz. Or you can get a credit card sized GSM phone for
~30 EUR in some in-flight magazines.

But I am sure you may be able to find more than adequate support
through Kickstarter or similar project sites. To be successful there,
you probably need to adjust your project classification to an
"educational" project or possibly as an mobile radio amateur
development learning project. I make this claim, because I see that
your project is very well documented and very mature for "mass"
production, all it need is a good and interesting wrapping, so that
more people get interested and can participate. Another port may be to
market your project to various hacker spaces and/or schools and
universities. You'd, of course, need to wrap it up in a pedagogic way
for that to be successful.

Please, don't get me wrong. I'd love to see your project succeed.

Best Regards,
E:V:A




On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 10:14 AM, Mychaela Falconia
<mychaela.falconia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Das Signal wrote:
>
>> Thank you for the clarification. It is worth noting as well that
>> there are important sunken costs that were necessary, in particular
>> the expensive R&S calibration unit (which had to be fixed, too)
>> and the rework job on the gerber that was essential as well.
>
> Regarding those sunk cost, I just did a little accounting to figure
> out just how much they add up to.  I've gone through my accounting
> logs going back to 2013 (the beginning of FreeCalypso), grepped for
> the E-MOBL accounting code ("engineering, mobile"), filtered out the
> expenses related to some of my other mobile ventures besides FC,
> leaving only FreeCalypso expenses, and added all of them up.  The
> result: I have spent a total of $12257.34 USD in accounted-for
> FreeCalypso expenses from the beginning of the project in 2013 through
> the present, and this total only includes those costs which I have
> paid with my own money, *not* crowdfunding.  The crowdfunding campaign
> for the FCDEV3B brought in a total of about $6700 (total through all
> channels, not just the GoFundMe page) which certainly helped a lot,
> but as you can see, my own personal investment is still almost double
> of what we've collected from everyone else combined.
>
> It still holds though that my asking price for an FCDEV3B board off
> the stock shelf (as opposed to build-to-order) is based primarily on
> sustainability considerations (preventing the scenario of all current
> boards being sold out without generating sufficient revenue to produce
> replacements) rather than on sunk costs - the latter are in the past
> and should not affect rational decisions regarding the present.  But
> given the fact that I was able to spend over 12 kUSD on FreeCalypso
> despite not being anywhere close to a member of "the rich", I absolutely
> don't buy the argument that $500 for a board is too much to ask for.
> If I was able to spend over 12 kUSD on this project purely out of
> personal passion while also doing all of the work, every one of you
> can most surely afford $500 for a board for which someone else has
> already done all of the work.
>
> M~
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