Almost every hardware team faces the same choice at the start of a build: hand the whole job to one supplier, or split it between a board fabricator, a component broker and an assembly house and save on each line. The per-unit prices look better when you split. The invoice at the end often does not.
The word is used loosely, so it is worth being precise.
True turnkey means one supplier owns the bare board, the components and the assembly. You send a Gerber file and a BOM; you get back a finished, tested assembly. That supplier is responsible for the fabrication, for sourcing every part, and for placing it correctly — and when a board comes back dead, there is nobody to argue with about whose fault it is.
This is different from a fabricator that "also does assembly" as an add-on, and different again from buying from three specialists and coordinating them yourself. The difference is not the work being done — it is who carries the risk.
The comparison that matters is not unit price. It is everything that surrounds it.
| Dimension | One turnkey supplier | Split across three suppliers |
|---|---|---|
| Quotes to reconcile | One | Three, arriving at different times and in different formats |
| Lead time | One schedule, from fabrication through assembly | The fabricator must finish before the assembler starts — days are lost in the handoff |
| Component sourcing | Sourced against the BOM by the same supplier that assembles | Your problem, unless you pay a broker to do it |
| When a board fails | One party is accountable | Fab, broker and assembler each point at the other two |
| Coming back from a defect | Reworked by the same team, at their cost if it is their error | Sub-assemblies travel between sites; re-qualification starts again |
| Freight | Bare boards do not ship anywhere — they move to the next process | Board to broker, broker to assembler, assembler to you |
| Setup paid for | Once | Three times — fabrication tooling, incoming inspection, assembly setup |
| Your time | One contact | You become the project manager, unpaid |
Splitting the work looks cheaper because the visible line items get smaller. These are the lines that do not show up until later.
Three suppliers means three sets of emails, three schedules to reconcile, three sets of questions to answer that only you can answer. At a hundred boards, the difference between one supplier and three is rarely the unit price — it is the number of people you have to manage. If your time is worth anything, it is already on the invoice, just not on theirs.
When a board comes back and does not work, the first question is why. Was the bare board fabricated wrong? Was the part counterfeit or the wrong grade? Was the placement off? With one supplier, that question is answered internally and the fix is their problem. With three, the question becomes a negotiation — and the parts that are already assembled cannot easily be un-assembled to prove a point.
Every supplier in the chain has its own setup: fabrication tooling and drill programming, incoming inspection and re-reeling at the broker, stencil and line changeover at the assembler. None of these shrink because your order is small — they are all fixed costs, and splitting the work multiplies the number of them you pay.
Bare boards are manufactured, then shipped. Components are bought, then shipped. Nothing moves for free, and international shipments carry customs handling at both ends. When the board never leaves the building between fabrication and assembly, none of that exists.
You are building 1 to a few thousand units, the product is still changing, and you do not want to become the coordinator between three vendors. This is the range where turnkey is genuinely cheaper once the hidden costs are counted.
You are running tens of thousands of units or more and can amortise the coordination across a large order — or you already have a fab and an assembler whose processes you trust and whose lines are already set up for your board.
A practical rule: split the work when the volume is large enough to make the coordination worth doing, and the product is stable enough that there is nothing left to change. Below that point you are paying for flexibility you are not using.
This page argues for turnkey, so it is only fair to say where that argument breaks down.
More on where we fit and where we do not: who we are right for →
No. Below roughly a thousand units turnkey usually wins once you count the hidden costs, because the setup, the freight and the coordination are paid once instead of three times. Above that, or if you already work with a fab and an assembler you trust, splitting can win on unit price.
With one supplier, we are — there is no argument about whether the bare board, the component or the placement caused the defect. When the work is split, the fab, the broker and the assembler can each point at the other two, and the cost of that dispute lands on you.
Yes. You can supply the BOM yourself as consigned stock, or we can source the components from our own supply chain. Consigned parts are yours to source, but note that we cannot warrant components we did not buy — that is a limitation of the model, not a policy.
If you are in the range where turnkey makes sense, the fastest way to find out what it costs is to send us the files. We will come back within 24 hours with a price, a lead time, and anything in the design we think you should fix before it is built.
