Has anybody in the UK had any PCBs made by the likes of JLCPCB, PCBWay etc since we’ve suffered The Will Of The People as implemented by The Government Of The F-ing Useless? I’m wanting to get my first PCBs made but the situation with import duties and handling costs is putting me off - I don’t want to have to pay Royal Mail £16 on top of shipping things over to collect the VAT on £5 worth of PCBs.
(I’ve not spoken to my mum for months thanks to her racism-fuelled Brexit voting and in that time I’ve had Covid and now have long covid, plus Christmas and New Year. Literally everything I could have warned her about has happened…)
I’m an American so VAT and import duties and all that is off the table for me. But one thing I do pay for is shipping, and so I’ve learned not to order £5 (or $5) worth of PCBs. I put in a JLCPCB order only when I’ve accumulated about half a dozen or more board and panel designs I want done. The shipping increment over a single design is small, so the total cost per board goes way down.
There’s a weird game of chicken you play here since sometimes they don’t bother to add a tax bill to small items, but they will for larger ones. So, you have to find the balance point between paying multiple shipping costs and paying the tariff. There’s no predictability to it, just randomized frustration.
I’ve just found this page on JLCPCB’s site which seems to suggest they would do the VAT collection, which means that the surcharges by Royal Mail wouldn’t happen. I guess they do enough trade into the UK that they can accept having to handle the tax and import legislation, so it’s all ‘just’ 20% more expensive than it was two months ago.
(In case you think I’m sitting on the fence, I despair at what 51.9% of the adults decided to do nearly five years ago… in that time the US had Trump and got rid of Trump, we’re stuck with this )
but we still have to deal with inflation and rising cost do to the stable genus’s idiot trade war . didn’t take a rocket surgeon to tell you no matter what happens with the tariffs the consumer pays .
This will be my first ever excursion into getting PCBs fabbed, so I’m not going to be spending much it would’ve comfortably been within the waived limit for import duty we had until the end of last year (the reason I rarely bought anything over £18 from overseas) but with that gone you can’t tell at first glance what you’re going to be stung for when looking at prices. All prices at AliExpress need to have at least 20% VAT added to them now, but you don’t find that out until the checkout - at least by doing that your orders aren’t going to get stopped and held captive at the border.
Apparently there’s some sort of exemption for unpopulated PCBs (amongst other things) but good luck finding out how to get that, and it almost certainly won’t be possible for a nerd in an attic (I am that nerd in an attic) having a bash at making noisy circuits to get any such thing without clever accountants and a business account.
)
it would’ve comfortably been within the waived limit for import duty we had until the end of last year (the reason I rarely bought anything over £18 from overseas) but with that gone you can’t tell at first glance what you’re going to be stung for when looking at prices. All prices at AliExpress need to have at least 20% VAT added to them now, but you don’t find that out until the checkout - at least by doing that your orders aren’t going to get stopped and held captive at the border.