Originally Posted by
blinkenlight
"Cheap" is relative concept - where I live $50 is a serious amount of money, especially for a single small PCB (and the nine other ones I have absolutely zero use for: I never needed more than one of anything), especially considering my small desktop CNC can crank the (functionally) same thing out for basically free, as FR4 costs almost nothing. You could of course point out that the price of said CNC is supposed to be much further out of my league than the $50 I seem to be so worked up about, and you would not be wrong at all - but as things happen I came to own that CNC for unrelated reasons and means; and once I have it, it makes PCB fabrication accessible to me in a way that a "cheap" $50 service absolutely never possibly could. And that's without even considering that by the time a Chinese-fabbed PCB would arrive to me I would not even remember what I wanted it for, and its purpose would long be either patched up with something else or moot by then.