To put it in perspective, used to pay about $85-$90 for 10 completed boards —- shipped —- now it is $316ish for 10 boards shipped.
Their CEO Andrew Seddon was recently on the AmpHour podcast:
https://theamphour.com/699-circuithub-12-years-later-with-an...
My project uses gerbers and they do not accept them. Will see what I can do
I speculate this is going to slow down the small hardware hobbyist small business space, by maybe 50%.
To expand, in too many words:
Personally I have a penchant for music synthesizers and many of them are from a one-person shop. I imagine these 3x price increases are going to slow people down. Determined and cost agnostic people will power through this. People who just have an idea and are actually motivated by the past inexpensive PCB prototyping universe, will a lot more about cost and prototyping and a lot less about the problem that they're solving. And I just can't imagine it being anything less than a 50% slowdown for those folks.
That's always been my problem with buying American. I'd be willing to pay 2x as much to support manufacturers in my own country. Maybe 3x. But 10x-15x as much? EABOD, I'll stick with China. While infuriating, the Trump tariffs are nowhere near enough to alter the outcome of that calculation.
Meanwhile our Chinese suppliers were honest with us.
The one benefit the American places are supposed to have, they managed to squander through either sheer greed or incompetence.
Plus these are going on high altitude balloons aka throwaway so a lot of people have a hard time spending that
> “Key questions remain unresolved, particularly regarding how and by whom customs duties will be collected in the future, what additional data will be required, and how the data transmission to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be carried out,” DHL, the largest shipping provider in Europe, said in a statement.
https://apnews.com/article/us-tariffs-goods-services-suspens...
> They cite ambiguity about what kind of goods are covered by the new rules, and the lack of time to process their implications.
I now have to pay an extra £1.50 "administration charge" for every gift I send to a friend in the USA, despite gifts under $100 still being exempt.
The fact that no one has the slightest clue how to implement this is insanity to the third degree.
How will it work for small, one off purchases? Well, I don't see how the tax payers are under any obligation to streamline that for people. The net effect will be to buy from US suppliers/importers, not directly from overseas.
There is no good here. I don't when it became popular or acceptable to restrict free trade and ignore reality.
0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-pr...
1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
I thought you were making a joke but that really is the name of the EO. It's so over for America
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/de-minimis-u-s-canada-endin...
Trump's policies are big on tough talk while actually having the opposite effects of the marketing. High import taxes hurt the pre-imported selection available from domestic retailers, as sellers have to pay the tax ahead of the sale and navigate the uncertainty that the rates might change in the future. Whereas direct-from-China goods already have cash in hand to pay the tariffs, and the only uncertainty is in the few days between purchase and arrival at customs. I expect to be buying many more things direct from Aliexpress, as the tariffs set in, domestic inventory is exhausted, and domestic-seller prices creep upwards.
Furthermore, the high tariffs on China do encourage investments in factories. Specifically, Chinese investment in factories outside of China, for final assembly of products. Investing in the United States would not be prudent, with the environment of political instability. So these policies are effectively strengthening China's relationships with other countries.
Never mind that many of the companies still known for manufacturing quality goods do so in other western countries. If the goal was really to oppose China, then it should have been time to pull together with our allies - not to levy import taxes to keep them (price-) uncompetitive with Chinese products, while alienating them with hostile rhetoric. Ultimately, our adversaries couldn't have dreamed of more favorable policies.
I think the thing some Americans mess themselves up with is thinking that the world perceives their domestic politics the same way they do. From our level of abstraction, America voted and Americans decided the country is going to be an anti-science, protectionist menace.
the U.S. launched the trade war against Canada, “their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”
> what's your carbon footprint?! You fly around in jets 3 times a year?!
> let's buy 30c disposable crap from across the world while essentially subsidizing advanced industrialization of societies completely disconnected from our own
The US Deminimis seemed quite generous. No wonder it is removed.
I know that you obviously know this, so it's a weird thing to mention in context of (additional) taxing of foreign goods.
The issue of course is that it's fraudulent. It remains to be seen how closely the US is going to be enforcing it. I have a feeling Chinese shippers will be under the most scrutiny.
Obviously the main problem is that tariffs do not lead to positive future outcomes for the country levying them.
This simply expires the exception for the remaining 25%.
Why not just end De Minimis to China and leave it for the rest of the world that doesn't take advantage of it and reciprocates with their own De Minimis for US Imports?
It’s not China but businesses. Mostly Chinese businesses but it’s still a lot of individual companies that utilize it.
Same with illegal immigration: Trump & others could hire only legal locals at their hotels/resorts/farms - but don’t. So we go in circles about how to “solve” it.
Unpopular, but same with drugs: dealers/cartels aren’t forcing anyone to snort cocaine or do heroin. They do horrific things otherwise, but users share blame for the actual drug use.
How is China "taking advantage" of anything? They produce decent products at low prices.
There is the law of unintended consequences. Other countries will now make American small business products much more expensive to export. Why would they give a De Minimis to these small businesses when the USA doesn't reciprocate?
You're only thinking about China and not the rest of the World. US small businesses buy things (under $800) from countries like Canada and the EU, and were able to do so because of De Minimus. Canadians could buy things from US small businesses without worrying about duties as long as it was under $500.
Now even the smallest item, even a gift from abroad worth $20, will incur a duty of $50-$250 plus administrative fees from the carrier.
When the de minimis exemption for China already ended 4 months ago?
And it would, in fact, have been easy for Trump to do exactly what you suggest, if that had been his intention?
This isn't about China.
This is about Trump's stubborn wrongheaded idea that tariffs are Good, Actually, and that means they should apply to everything.
I'm not thrilled with the way China acts in general, but come on; place the blame where it really belongs—and not on one of the victims.
It is important to also capture tarrifs from high value parcels, as for small but high value items a parcel can very much be a similar bulk import. (Picture diamonds. A moderate sized parcel full of them is very much a bulk import).
But at the same time trying to collect tarrifs on every parcel was historically deemed non-viable. Way too much work for too little gain. Especially since historically, the addressee of the parcel often ends up paying the tarrif, this requiring customs to communicate this to the parcel carriers broker, who must communicate it and collect from the end customer, who finally gives the money to the broker, who submits it to the government. Meanwhile CBP needs to store this package.
This whole process ends up just annoying your countries own citizens, and generated little revenue, so a de minimis exemption of some form was highly desireable. And to most politicians there seemed like little downside to setting it fairly large. Sure $800 is probably larger than reasonable, but it certainly means the average person would rarely ever need to interact with this process, and that was good enough.
Look, I'm all about the race to the bottom but the market needs to be fair
Yes, the majority by volume is from China, and from large trash sites that rightly aren't sustainable...
... but the second order effects on small businesses and consumers who enjoy buying from them.
Bold to hold contempt for free-market capitalism, when it's made your society so staggeringly wealthy, your concern of the day is literally worrying about landfills filling up with surplus wealth. Find some perspective.
This wealthy engineer mindset is too literal. The AI-generated photos and fake reviews aren't bugs. They're features. They let the poor American with $100 of disposable income pretend they found a way to get an Apple Watch for $11. Just for a few days, they get to believe it might be real. When it arrives and it's crap, they knew it would be. But they got to play the fantasy.
TEMU's tagline is "Shop like a billionaire." I want you to really think about that. Marketers test hundreds of combinations to find what resonates. TEMU probably has thousands of marketers. They've tested millions of possible hooks. Millions. And this is what won.
"Shop like a billionaire" is the message that brought new people in the door above all others. Now what about churn? That's not the tagline's job. Don't let your knowledge of what exactly TEMU does and how it functions conceal from you this signal of what many (not all!!) people want.
However I believe they're not scamming people. They're delivering exactly what they're selling, which is the experience of feeling like you could have nice things.
Twenty years ago you could go to a matinee movie for a dollar. Two hours of escapism for a dollar. That product doesn't exist anymore. Theaters decided to serve a different customer base. They went upmarket. But people still want cheap escapism. Now it's $1-3 on TEMU to get that same escape. You browse, you dream, you wait for the package. It's entertainment.
TEMU is making things people want.
Not saying you’re wrong, but I find “Shop like a billionaire” to be a deeply weird slogan.
The environment cost is higher with the middleman "small business" because they need their own logistics (likely Amazon). So instead of a carrier driving from the boat to USPS/OnTrac, it goes into the warehouses at Amazon. Wow! Thanks! World saved! In the eloquent words of our dear leader: SAD!
In any event, volumewise I presume Ali does more environmental damage than hobby electronics being shipped through Amazon.
It's easy to be snobbish about "low quality crap" from Shein etc if you have the money and preference to buy better, but for many people cheap stuff from China, whether bought in Walmart or online, is a godsend.
In terms of jobs and American manufacturers, there is zero demand for clothing sweatshop jobs in America, just as you don't see Americans lining up to replace illegals for low wage crop picking jobs.
All this is doing is making things more expensive for consumers. It's a consumer tax paid for by those who can least afford it.
There is a reason shipping stopped.
I'm happy if there's an environmental improvement from this (never bought from the stores you mentioned), but a counterpoint may be in how all this impacts those trying to operate repair shops, labs, and teach science. Bunnie Huang had some arguments on tariffs back in 2018: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2018/new-us-tariffs-are-a...
There were some arguments from repair youtuber Louis Rossmann also from a few months ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xR2_eqNL604&pp=ygUWbG91aXMgcm9...
People think that this just means that their nieces will stop buying junky fast fashion or whatever but that their own clean aescetic lifestyle will be unimpacted. But, no, that avocado toast is bankrolled by your employer and IRA and investment accounts or whatever, none of which are prepared for a 10% GDP contraction (or whatever) because the rubes can't buy their skorts anymore.
Economies are boats. We all sink or swim together.
I don't think this will give big advantage to US shops, it will mostly be extra expenses for consumers.
Americans are rich and will buy wastefully made expensive item if cheaper alternative is not available.
