Best Electronics Contract Manufacturers for Hardware Startups

The short answer: Screaming Circuits is the best first call for a hardware startup, because it states the thing nobody else states plainly, that the minimum order size is one, and because it publishes when the turn time clock actually starts. MacroFab is the pick if you want a real quote without a sales conversation, at no contracts and no minimums with an itemized price in under 15 minutes, and it is the only ITAR registered self service assembly platform if your board touches defense work. CircuitHub is the fastest published default at three day full turnkey, and it is the only company here that publishes its own delivery performance. Sierra Circuits and Pro-Active Engineering cover quick turn work with a fab under the same roof and defense certifications respectively. Amtech is not where most startups will build, but it publishes the number the rest of the category will not: $600 to $1,750 in non recurring engineering per job.

This comparison was built by reading each company's own website in September 2026. Where a company publishes nothing on a point, that is recorded as not stated rather than estimated. The full buyer's guide behind these figures, including why the minimum order question is the wrong one to lead with and what to ask instead, sits on our electronics contract manufacturers and PCB assembly services page.

Eight US assembly partners, compared on what they publish

Two of the eight publish anything resembling a minimum, and both publish it to say there isn't one. Exactly one publishes a price. That ratio is the opposite of every consumer goods category we have surveyed, where minimums are everywhere and prices are nowhere, and it tells you to run your search differently.

What each one is actually best at

Screaming Circuits: the clearest terms, and the sentence everyone else omits

Screaming Circuits in Milwaukie, Oregon, part of Milwaukee Electronics, answers the minimum order question in eleven words on its own FAQ: the minimum order size is one, and it builds single board prototypes through volume runs. That alone makes it a sensible first call when you have five boards and a deadline.

The more valuable thing it publishes is buried further down. It states that assembly cannot begin until all materials required for the build have been received, that the receiving cutoff is noon, and that the day the last material arrives by noon becomes the official assembly start date, with turn times counted on a rolling 24 hour basis. Every assembly house in America works this way. This is the only one we found that writes it down. If you take one thing from this comparison, take that sentence into your next quote conversation, because the difference between a three day turn and a three month project is entirely which day the clock starts.

It also publishes the practical edges most people discover late: panelization is recommended above 25 boards or for boards under 16 square inches, the minimum passive it will place is 0201, IC pitch below 0.5 mm down to 0.35 mm needs a stencil it sources itself, and leftover components from a consigned build come back to you with the finished order. Best for a first prototype run, and for anyone who wants the rules in writing before they commit.

MacroFab: a real number without a sales call

MacroFab in Houston puts no contracts and no minimums directly under its quote button, and the promise behind it is a quote in under 15 minutes from a bill of materials and design files in nearly any format, itemized rather than a single lump figure. For a startup that needs to put a number in a budget this week, that is worth more than a slightly better price arriving in four days.

Two things set it apart. It describes itself as the only ITAR registered self service PCB assembly platform, which matters if your product has any export controlled content, because that combination is genuinely rare: ITAR shops usually sell through a program manager, not a web form. And its consigned inventory model is honest about something most people learn the hard way, offering component storage at its warehouse with live consumption tracking that explicitly includes manufacturing wastage. Machines lose parts. If you are supplying your own components, you are supplying more than the board count, and MacroFab is one of the few that says so on the page rather than in an email after the fact. Best for teams that want to price options themselves before committing to a partner.

CircuitHub: the only one publishing how often it actually delivers on time

CircuitHub builds in the USA and makes speed the whole proposition: three day full turnkey fabrication and assembly by default. What makes the claim credible is the second number next to it, that it ships 81 percent of full turnkey orders within three days as standard, published alongside live performance metrics. It describes itself as the first in the industry to publish key performance indicators in real time, and that is a fair claim from what we could see. Everyone advertises a lead time. One company advertises its hit rate.

The other useful detail is in its quoting flow. Its system extracts part numbers from your design files, builds the bill of materials, and alerts you to out of stock parts and to component minimum order quantities as you go, drawing on a shared inventory of more than 35,000 common parts. That component MOQ alert is doing quiet work. The minimum that will actually bite a five board run is not the assembler's, it is the distributor selling a connector on a 2,500 piece reel. Best for a design that is still changing weekly and needs to keep changing.

Sierra Circuits and Pro-Active Engineering: fab in house, and the certified path

Sierra Circuits in Sunnyvale runs fabrication and assembly in the same building and publishes a turn time menu rather than a range: one, two, three, four, five and ten business days, with the ability to expedite a board within 24 hours. That structure suits a specific problem. If your bare board is the constraint, because of a tight stackup, controlled impedance or an unusual material, having the fab and the assembly under one roof removes a handoff that otherwise adds a week and a finger pointing opportunity.

Pro-Active Engineering in Wisconsin publishes quick turnaround prototype assemblies in two to five days and, more importantly for some buyers, states ISO 9001:2015, ITAR registration and JCP certification together, with prototype, medium volume and high volume work on the same line. That last part is the real pitch. Moving from a prototype shop to a production shop means requalifying everything, and a partner that can carry you from twenty boards to twenty thousand without a transfer is worth paying for if your roadmap is real. Best for defense, aerospace and industrial programs that intend to scale.

Amtech, Bittele and QueenEMS: the ones to read rather than necessarily to buy from

Amtech earns its place here for one reason: it publishes what US contract manufacturers typically charge in non recurring engineering, $600 to $1,750 per job, and then shows the arithmetic that makes it matter. A $600 setup fee is $120 a board at five units, $12 a board at fifty, and $1.20 a board at five hundred. It publishes product cost bands too, a simple two layer board at $20 to $80 each in ones to tens, $10 to $40 at eleven to fifty, and $10 to $30 at fifty one to two hundred and fifty, with a wearable example at roughly $100 a board at five units dropping to around $35 at a hundred. Those are its figures for its market, not a universal price list, and a dense six layer board with a BGA will not sit in them. As a sanity check on a quote you have already received, they are the best public reference we found.

Bittele Electronics and QueenEMS both publish articles whose headings promise the cost of setup and tooling and then do not give one. Bittele's is titled Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) and Tooling Costs and explains that the figure depends on board dimensions, layer count and order quantity. QueenEMS covers what NRE means and how to reduce setup and tooling charges, and is genuinely good on the question of who owns the tooling and when it can be reused. Neither contains a dollar amount. That is not a criticism of either article, but it is worth naming the pattern, because a founder who reads two pieces about cost that contain no cost will conclude the number cannot be known. It can. One company wrote it down.

The four questions that turn a vague quote into a budget

Because the minimum order quantity is not the lever in electronics, the standard first email does not work. Ask these four instead, in writing, of every shop on your shortlist.

What is the NRE, as a separate line? Not folded into the board price. You want the number so you can divide it yourself and see what quantity makes the run sensible.

Is the NRE broken out or amortized, and when does the amortization end? Optimum Design Associates sets out the mechanism plainly: a $100 assembly might be billed at $110 per unit until the setup is paid off, then drop back to $100. Tooling and programming are reusable on repeat orders of the same revision, so the charge should stop. If nobody says when, it quietly becomes permanent. Ask as well whether a minor revision, a changed resistor value or a new silkscreen, resets it.

What is the per board price at my quantity and at double it? The gap between those two numbers is the clearest read you will get on how much of the quote is fixed cost rather than product. It is the same move that works in every other sourcing category, and it works better here because the fixed cost is proportionally larger.

What is the longest lead part on my bill of materials, and is anything single sourced? This is the question that decides your ship date. Accuris Supply Chain Intelligence, tracking average lead times across part categories through March 2026, recorded semiconductors reaching a 40 week ceiling in March 2026, a 67 percent jump in a single month, against the 20 to 25 weeks typical through most of 2025. Passives held steadier at 10 to 20 weeks. A shop that answers this question properly has actually opened your BOM. A shop that does not has quoted a board it has not read.

Where the rest of your first build goes

Almost no hardware product ships as a bare assembled board, and the parts of a first build that catch teams out are usually the ones sourced somewhere else. Enclosures, brackets and heatsinks come from machine shops and fabricators whose economics work nothing like an assembly house, which is covered on our CNC machining companies page, and the same trade off in sheet metal chassis work sits on metal fabricators. If the size of the first commitment is what you are working around across all of those categories at once, our low MOQ manufacturers guide covers how to structure a first order when every supplier wants a bigger one.

One more thing worth planning before the boards land, because it is the failure your customers will actually see. A connected product spends its life talking to an endpoint you run, and the first support wave for most hardware startups is not a solder joint, it is an API that went quiet at two in the morning while the founders slept. Putting that endpoint on uptime monitoring that checks APIs and ports every 30 seconds costs a rounding error against the NRE and turns a weekend of angry emails into a push notification. It is a cheaper fix before the fleet exists than after.

How to run the shortlist

Sort by volume band first, because a quick turn prototype house and a production line are different businesses and a shop that does not want your run will price it to go away rather than decline it. Then filter on certification, which is market access rather than a quality badge: ISO 13485 and FDA registration for medical, AS9100 for aerospace, IATF 16949 for automotive, ITAR for export controlled work. Then decide turnkey or consigned, and if consigned, budget attrition stock and check the reel quantities on your own BOM before you congratulate yourself on the saving.

Price comes last, and only between shops that passed the first three filters. A cheaper quote from a partner that cannot legally build your product, or that will not want your second order, is not a cheaper quote. That is the whole discipline, and it is why the shortlist matters more than the negotiation.