Hey, thanks for commenting. I'm a big fan of your transparency and don't get me wrong, I like the product and the price is certainly better than the "enterprise" gear.
But I personally don't care about support, the enclosure can be 3d printed or some cheap plastic box, if sold as DIY kit it would save assembly costs and avoid need for certification and so on. I think there is a small market for homelabers like myself who would pay maybe $100-150 for a simpler product.
>But I personally don't care about support, the enclosure can be 3d printed or some cheap plastic box, if sold as DIY kit it would save assembly costs and avoid need for certification and so on. I think there is a small market for homelabers like myself who would pay maybe $100-150 for a simpler product.
We used to sell both the pre-made units and a $190 DIY kit. Surprisingly, when I tried removing the DIY kits, sales jumped by 50%. And it wasn't just higher revenue because people were buying the more expensive product - order volume increased too.[0]
My theory is that when we asked customers if they wanted to pay more for a pre-made version, some of them stopped to think about which version they wanted and then just never returned. So, when we simplified to just one product, it eliminated friction in the buying process.
With the Pi 4 shortage the past few years, using our limited Pi 4 supply for DIY kits instead of our pre-made product would be a terrible move. We're expecting the shortage to be over in the next few months, but even if there was a way for me to sell an extra 50 units per month at a $50 profit, selling a second product line and managing it end-to-end is so complicated that it wouldn't be worth the extra $2.5k/month. And that $2.5k/month is before chargebacks, hiring people to assemble and fulfill the kits, etc.
We do still work to serve DIY customers and make sure our software stays compatible with users who just use off-the-shelf parts. And we still sell a power splitter,[1] as it's the one thing you can't really buy off the shelf from other vendors. We're able to do that because they cost about $10/unit to make, so we can make a year's worth in a week and just ship them to our warehouse. But doing that with a whole kit would be way more costly.
But I personally don't care about support, the enclosure can be 3d printed or some cheap plastic box, if sold as DIY kit it would save assembly costs and avoid need for certification and so on. I think there is a small market for homelabers like myself who would pay maybe $100-150 for a simpler product.
And congrats on being profitable.