04.03.2022
Lately, we received some pricing critique for our recently most wanted product after the price for our FLARM BOOSTER went up. And with it, voices from the Helium mining community grew loud. We appreciate the pricing critique and understand how this looks – and we should have communicated earlier and better.
In December, when the Video fromCrypto Mining and Trading about our amplifier went viral, the rush on our webshop due to the high demand for Helium mining hardware hit us with surprise – and we were sold out in minutes. This forced us to commit substantial resources to be able to meet demand. We accepted significant short notice expenses to ramp up volume quickly. And we made other investments to support our new customers. All reflecting in the adapted pricing for e.g. our FLARM BOOSTER. We negotiated making shipping possible at reasonable costs to all parts of the 868MHz world and created additional support material to make FLARM boosters easier to install. Plus, we designed changes to meet the Helium community needs: 10dBm, protection from SMA abuse and an N-version for outdoors – all coming. Above all, we ramped up our production volume, short term and at the acceptance of all cost increases, in times of worldwide shortages in supply and logistics. There are huge changes to our infrastructure (new web shop to handle short term volume). And our production cycle since FLARM booster in the past was produced once a year in a long term planned production lot and sold via our webshop over the same time.
Going forward things are now improving and we are adopting as follows: We will start to sell FLARM boosters in production badges and pricing will vary with lead time: for immediate availability (presently 0 – this week hopefully 100) we will keep at €325, in 45 days at €248 and in 120 days at €198, basically back to the old price at our regular production lead times (all including German VAT). This will give those who expect higher income for themselves the opportunity to get going quickly by paying more. And those who can wait a little a price one might perceive as more “fair”.
All in all, this opens up a chance for us to better plan production – and reduce our cost substantially by not running everything on spot market pricing, express shipping and overtime production. We also have been working on reducing shipping cost substantially, giving buyers a chance to decide between express and regular mail speeds, especially in more distant countries.
