pricing

Microchip does, they run an on-line shop.

Best regards, Piotr

so does AD and ST tells you how many is available at each of their distributors and a single click takes you to the buy page I'm sure many others do to

Having purchased single items of little value many times and frequently as an individual here's what I've found works the best to get pricing.

Request a quote for item whatever with shipping and give a zip code. That's apparently close enough to a purchase order that somebody will eventually get back to you to fill in the blanks and complete the order by giving you a call or a quote.

Just asking "how much is x" doesn't seem to work for the most part.

Then I guess they reveal what it is.

That's not the AD or ST price.

Den fredag den 31. marts 2017 kl. 02.29.33 UTC+2 skrev snipped-for-privacy@notreal.com:

no, but their listed +1000 price and the distributors price is atleast a place to start

Of course the above is irrelevant.

I'd wonder why krw thought that, if I were silly enough to think that krw could think.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

The difference is that Microchip does that (or pretends they do) directly, which is the closest approximation of what KRW wanted.

Best regards, Piotr

Indeed:

Quantity: 1-25, unit price 1.29EUR.

I believe that there is a subcontractor hidden behind that shop to relieve Microchip from the need to interact with the less-than-railway-carriage quantity people, but the impression is very good.

I buy there every now and then, high quality service. The main problem is that they ship from Malaysia, so the delivery takes ~4 weeks. Not a solution for rapid development if you need it.

Best regards, Piotr

You can buy directly from AD. And TI, and Maxim (ha). Many others I'm sure. More of those that don't sell directly online are providing a price guide, which is a welcome improvement.

It's still easier to use DK to shortlist parts IME (~few k production quantities).

--

John Devereux

I also prefer Farnell (there is a tiny difference between

4 weeks and 24h shipment), but if you want the newest chip or some exotica, there is no other option than go there directly and wait.

Best regards, Piotr

FAE's ?

The scientific instrument company I worked for would not put anything into production unless the raw BOM cost was under 25% of selling price. This led to insane late stage cost cutting to shave off pennies to hit the rigid budget target (like switch stainless nuts and bolts for mild steel which quickly rusts and using a lower grade powder coat finish). It is actually a damn good heuristic for relatively low volume high end kit in a fast moving market but they applied it far too rigidly.

There was a story I was taught about this pricing distinction. Two or three major players shared all major contracts to supply cleaning products. A new start-up came in that hadn't done their market research properly and bid at materials plus 30% profit margin costing - undercutting all the existing players by about a factor of three. The won almost all of the contracts but didn't survive for very long.

The market encumbents took it in turns to corner the market in the key ingredients so that the newcomer could not make enough finished product to fulfil the contracts they had won. They quickly went bust.

A variant of this trick is how Pilkington/Chance wiped out all other competition in the UK window glass market during the Victorian era. (you only have to corner the market in one key ingredient)

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Sure, for actually *buying* low quantities in the UK. But DK has the best selection and search engine, anywhere, for design purposes.

DK are not that bad for shipment to the UK, I think it's ~12 UKP, and free above $50 or so. Which is not hard to acheive. Shipping is only a couple of days.

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John Devereux

You can't trust the prices manufacturers list. I designed in an ADI part because it was cheaper than the Maxim equivalent. In production the ADI part ended up just as expensive if not more so.

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Rick C

Well you can if you can buy from them direct I suppose. When you can't, I agree they are not totally reliable but it's better than nothing IME.

Yes I have had that a couple of times. I remember it with TI, none of the distys were able to match their 1k "budget price". They have recently enabled buying direct from their site, and the prices now match. E.g.

You may be able to get "supported" pricing from distributors for some parts, at the design-in stage. They register you with the manufacturer in exchange for a discounted price as long as you buy from that distributor, AIUI. We did it for a couple of parts and it seems to have enabled the disty to undercut the others by perhaps 30%. Value was not enormous, perhaps $5k/year.

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John Devereux

ADI had do deliver the parts, Maxim just say they are out of stock

ducks ...

The only apple software I use is CUPS which seems to work pretty well, except the open-source CITIZEN thermal P.O.S. printer driver doesn't run right on Macs. it runs fine on raspbery-pi though.

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This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software

I just call the local (outside) sales guy and they send me whatever I need (he took me out to lunch a couple of weeks ago and brought six full reels of opamps and will be bringing three more in a week or so). Some companies are a little more picky. They want to know what project I'm using the parts on before they'll send them.