What are NRE costs?
NRE costs (non-recurring engineering) are the one-off costs incurred before the first good assembly leaves the line: the stencil, programming and setting up the placement machines, feeder setup, first-article inspection, test fixtures and process documentation. They arise per order or per manufacturing revision, not per piece.
What counts as an NRE cost
Typically: the SMD stencil, writing and proving out the placement programs, setting up feeders and soldering profiles, programming AOI and test systems, a test fixture where one is needed, first-article inspection with its documentation, and the manufacturing preparation work itself. All of it happens once, and none of it gets cheaper because more assemblies are built.
Why they decide the price on small lots
A worked example: 1,200 € of NRE spread over a lot of 20 assemblies is 60 € per piece. The same 1,200 € over 2,000 assemblies is 60 cents per piece, a factor of 100. On prototypes and small series the NRE share is therefore often larger than material and placement time combined, while in volume production it disappears into the noise.
The most common mistake: burying NRE in the unit price
If the one-off share is spread across the quantity and only a unit price is quoted, the offer is immediately wrong at any other lot size, and the customer cannot see which part of the price disappears when they order more. The clean way is to show them separately: one-off cost per order, unit cost per assembly, and the quantity breaks that follow from the two.
Where this shows up in PCBoffer
PCBoffer reports one-off cost separately from unit cost. It does not come from a flat rate but from what the order actually triggers: stencil, setup time per placement machine derived from the pick-and-place data, programming times, test equipment. The quantity break across several lot sizes falls out as a result rather than as an estimate.
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