Just got simple boards back from a US shop in 3 days, finally

I landed on a slightly diffrent setup for this. For small two-layer boards I use Osh Park, which is domestic and has flat pricing based on board area with three copies included. Checkout takes about two minutes, no sales emails, no waiting. The catch is timing, my orders ussually show up a week and a half or so later here in the Midwest, so it's not the same as your three days. Still, I upload files, pay, and forget about it, and the boards have always been clean, nice purple finish and a tidy silkscreen. When I genuinely need boards fast I've gone to one of the bigger US shops that runs an instant quote on their site. That cost me several times what Osh Park woud have, but I had my boards four business days later for a deadline project, and I never had to call anyone. So now I sort of keep both in my back pocket. Cheap and easy for prototype iteration, fast and pricey when a due date is breathing down my neck. Checking the shipping cost on the overseas quotes is what pushed me domestic, once you add that in the gap gets smaller than it first looks.

I went the other direction on this and just made peace with email quotes at a small fab in Oregon. The lady who runs sales there gets back to me same day, and after the third order she already knows my stackup and panel preferences, so it's basically one short email now. Three days turnaround on a batch of ten for less than what I'd pay five boards at the instant-quote places. Slower to start the relationship, but it pays off if you keep tinkering like I do. The other thing I learned the hard way is to order more copies than you think you need. I used to do five, then I'd botch a hand-soldered joint or fry a pad with the iron and be out of spares. Now it's twenty minimum on anything simple, since the per-board price drops to almost nothing at that quantity. One small tip for anyone ordering single-sided stuff: check whether the fab actually does true single layer or just quotes you a two-layer with one side unused. I got surprised once when a house only ran two-layer minimum and my silkscreen ended up under the solder mask because I'd picked the wrong layer order in the upload.

I found success using a small shop in Texas when I needed a specific board thickness. My project required a rigid carrier, and I needed the panels cut to exactly 1.6mm. It took them four business days to get the boards shipped out, which was fast enought for my timeline. Because I specified the material, the setup fee was higher, about $15, but the dimensional accuracy was perfect. Don't underestimate how critical that thickness can be depending on the final housing design.

I'm finding the whole quoting process confusing because my design is super simple, just a couple of traces. I'm not sure if any of the instant quote tools handle really low layer counts well for small runs. I keep running into issues where the online form doesn't let me specify the stackup details. I have a very basic signal routing job, and I worry that the cheapest quick options might struggle with simple routing or have hidden setup fees that aren't obvious til the very end. Does anyone know if smaller hobbyist boards are acutally reliable for just two or three layers without needing a full service quote?

I have observed that even for designs which appear incredibly basic on paper, the submission of the gerber files necessitates meticulous attention to detail regarding the layer order and the layer stackup definition, which is surprisingly tedious when dealing with a rapid quoting system. It seems these smaller shops, which facilitate those faster responses, are often less forgiving of minor fabrication drawing errors than the larger, slower facilities. I spent considerable time trying to specify a particular trace clearance setting because the automated tools do not always clarify what values are used as the default parameter when processing a small order.