Contract manufacturing pricing
Open bookModuloa's contract manufacturing pricing model is a proposal for buying production capacity with visible costs and fees. Compare per-unit pricing with a capacity subscription, see how unit costs are assembled, and check the limits. No hub is certified and no customer has been charged.
Unit cost breakdown · Payment models · What has to be proven
Four lines earn, and everything else passes through at cost
Not in your materials: the costed BOM is built from supplier attestations, line by line, and you see every one. Not in freight: freight, duty and brokerage pass through at documented cost. Not in the exchange rate: it is named to its published series and date, and the conversion charge is its own visible line.
Per unit: the margin is recalculated openly against actuals after the pilot under the published terms (some units we win, some we lose), and estimation error on the NRE is ours: under T-05 we absorb undercalculation and refund overcalculation. Capacity: the handling rate is flat and published, so a larger BOM does not quietly earn us more. The framework: other factories pay it, so it never enters your unit price. Logistics: the orchestration fee is quoted per unit at RFQ and reconciled against the actual invoices at shipment.
None of these four lines has been charged. No hub is certified, no contract is signed, no unit has shipped. The rate card, the handling rate and the orchestration fee are commitments to publish a number, not numbers you can read today. Each becomes a dated claim in the register when the first contract signs.
What a unit actually costs you
One landed number, built from parts you can audit, quoted at RFQ with its confidence attached, reconciled at shipment against real invoices, variance on the record.
The confidence number covers the whole stack (attested lines versus estimated ones, the labor model's maturity, the freight snapshot's age), and variance is tracked per product, because a landed cost you never true up is a guess wearing a suit. Quotes carry validity windows; beyond them, prices index to a public freight benchmark.
Compare total spend for the same product and demand forecast, rather than only the unit price. Model A earns inside each unit. Model B adds a yearly capacity subscription and changes the unit charge to documented cost plus a flat handling rate. Include the subscription, one-time non-recurring engineering (NRE), freight, duty and orchestration, then apply the handling deductions and service credits the contract allows. Reserved capacity can go unused, so the rollover and renewal rules below matter too. The rates are not published yet, so neither a saving nor a break-even volume can be calculated here.
Before comparing prices, use the production tier calculator to explore the product's requirements. It suggests a tier from five inputs, not a price. Production blueprint engineering explains the setup work, and the thesis's production tiers explain the trade between upfront engineering, repeatability and portability.
Pick the model: all three are published
A and B are customer payment models: a price per unit or a subscription for reserved capacity. C charges participating hubs for the framework; it is not a third customer unit-cost formula. All three are proposals, with the same factory OS and cost transparency.
Classic, kept honest
A unit price with our margin in it, recalculated openly after the pilot under the published terms (the T-05 mechanics above). For one-time builds and first engagements.
Production as a membership
Units at documented cost plus a flat, published handling rate, and a yearly subscription that buys what nobody else sells: reserved capacity with a two-week order-to-ship promise, at any hub your product is qualified for. The margin lives in the membership, not the unit. Precedents, and the literature that priced them, in the field note.
How the network earns
Hubs pay for certification and the factory OS, blueprint deployments to a new hub carry a fee, routed production carries a network transaction fee. The revenue that scales without owning every factory, exactly as the thesis prices it.
The subscription is designed against its own known failure modes, because they are documented. Capacity is never oversold: at most 85% of a hub's nameplate is subscribable. Half the fee is deductible against handling on units you actually ship; unused reserved units roll over one quarter; you can resize ±20% at renewal. The two-week promise penalizes us, not you. Misses convert to service credits. And the "any qualified hub" right comes with one second-hub qualification included, because two chained hubs capture nearly all the protection of many. Customers who pay for capacity deserve mechanics that make unused capacity survivable. The alternative is the resentment economics of gym memberships, and we have read that literature too.
Reserved capacity only works if demand is honest in both directions. Every production customer gets a live forecast they can see, comment on and correct. The model learns from the comments and from actual orders, and the contract binds both sides to it. That is what makes the subscription price defensible.
What has to be proven
Model B is conditional, and the conditions are published: it needs at least two certified hubs with chained qualifications before "any hub" is a promise rather than a poster; it needs 12–24 months of utilization data before hard take-or-pay pricing (until then the fee is anchored to the cost of capacity actually held); and it needs a written definition of "cost" (attested BOM plus the published rate card, with audit rights) or the model's best sentence becomes its biggest dispute. The known failure modes have names: the chip industry's capacity fees were renegotiated in the last downturn, and roughly a third of cloud commitments go to waste. The deductibility, rollover, and resize mechanics above exist precisely because we studied how this dies. Logistics ownership carries the one problem software cannot fix: being importer of record is entities, bonds, and real liability, per country. Legal infrastructure, built hub by hub.
Why these numbers are checkable
Every position above was researched before it was published. Why the admin layer is software here: The hidden factory is an office. Why landed cost is quoted and then proven: The loop nobody closes. Why the exchange rate gets its own line: When the rate becomes the margin. Why capacity is sold as a membership: Capacity is a membership. Each note carries its sources and its dates, and says what it does not settle.
Where these numbers came from
ECB: euro foreign exchange reference rates, method and disclaimer ·ECB: EUR/USD daily series ·ECB: reuse policy for ESCB statistics ·ECB: global trade invoicing currencies ·Norges Bank: published exchange rates ·FSB: cross-border payment cost and transparency, October 2024 ·FSB: G20 cross-border payment targets ·Regulation (EU) 2019/518: conversion charges as a mark-up over ECB reference rates ·European Commission: Compendium of Customs Valuation Texts (conversion rate and pre-fixed rates) ·European Commission: InforEuro monthly accounting rates ·FAR 52.225-17: evaluation of foreign-currency offers (source of rate must be named) ·WTO: Customs Valuation Agreement, Article 9 on currency conversion ·BIS: covered interest parity and the cross-currency basis (what forward points actually are) ·ACCC: foreign currency conversion services inquiry (mid-market-plus-disclosed-fee pricing in practice) ·ICC: Incoterms rules do not address the currency of payment ·AACE International RP 58R-10: segregating currency exchange from escalation and contingency ·Filed EMS supply agreements and 10-K FX disclosure (Jabil, Flex, Plexus, Benchmark, Sanmina: via EDGAR) ·Fabrinet: SEC filings ·Celestica: SEC filings ·NOTE AB: year-end report 2025 ·Turnkey vs consigned EMS: materials markup practice ·Freight forwarder margin structure ·Landed-cost practice: the unclosed loop ·Freightos: freight-rate volatility ·Buyer's consolidation: the savings mechanics ·GlobalFoundries–Cirrus capacity reservation agreement (SEC) ·AWS Reserved Instances: commitment pricing ·Costco: margin in the membership ·Flexera: cloud commitment waste ·DellaVigna & Malmendier: the gym-membership problem ·Cachon: push, pull, and advance-purchase risk sharing ·Jordan & Graves: chained flexibility ·Amazon FBA: published logistics fee precedent ·Optimum Design: the cost-plus quote model ·Zetter: what the EMS quote is not telling you ·VentureOutsource, should-cost: direct labor under 2% ·Miller & Vollmann: The Hidden Factory (HBR, 1985)