Tooling gets all the attention in a hardware budget. Molds and dies are visible, quotable, and terrifying, so founders plan for them. The line that turns those molded parts into finished, boxed, tested product is discovered late, priced badly, and funded out of whatever is left — usually a bigger number than people expect. A modest manual line for a consumer electronics product lands between $40,000 and $120,000 before anyone is paid to stand at it.

The figures below are US-dollar ranges for a product of moderate complexity — thirty to sixty components, some electronics, a functional test, retail packaging. Overseas contract manufacturers absorb parts of this into a per-unit price, which does not make it free; it makes it invisible, and it usually means they own the fixtures.

Workstations and the Physical Line

  • Assembly benches: $700 to $3,000 each, ESD-safe with lighting and power. A five-station line needs five, plus rework and packing benches.
  • Material handling: bins, flow racks, and kitting carts, $3,000 to $12,000. Cheap, and the first thing skipped.
  • Conveyors: $150 to $600 per linear foot. Many low-volume lines run better without one, passing totes hand to hand.
  • ESD control: matting, wrist straps, ionizers, and an audit, $2,500 to $9,000 if you touch bare boards.
  • Facility work: air drops, dedicated circuits, lighting, $5,000 to $25,000.

Fixtures and Tooling at the Station Level

This is where the money actually goes, because every operation that needs to be repeatable needs a physical thing to make it repeatable.

A machined aluminum nest that holds a housing in the right orientation runs $400 to $2,000. A press-fit fixture with an arbor press and stop is $1,500 to $6,000. A heat-staking fixture with a multi-tip head is $4,000 to $15,000. Ultrasonic welding tooling is $3,000 to $9,000 per part on top of the welder at $8,000 to $30,000. A metered dispensing station for adhesive or potting is $12,000 to $45,000.

Budget one to three fixtures per station and expect a revision cycle: the first version of any fixture is wrong in some small way that only appears at volume. Printed prototypes shorten that loop, and many production nests stay printed permanently, as covered in 3D printed jigs and fixtures.

Torque control deserves its own line. Screwdriving is the most common assembly operation and the most common source of field failures from stripped bosses and loose fasteners. Electric torque drivers with controllers run $500 to $2,500 each; systems that log every fastener add $3,000 to $10,000 per station and pay for themselves the first time you must prove a unit was built correctly.

Test Stations: The Line Item That Doubles

Every product needs a functional test before it goes in a box, and for electronics that test station is often the most expensive object on the line.

  • Simple functional test — power up, check current draw, verify LEDs and buttons: $4,000 to $15,000 including a pogo-pin fixture, instruments, and test software.
  • Electrical safety test — hipot and ground bond for a mains product: $6,000 to $20,000 with an interlocked fixture.
  • Calibration station for anything that measures: reference standard, environmental fixture, and a path to write coefficients into the device, $15,000 to $80,000.
  • Leak test for sealed products: $10,000 to $40,000 for pressure-decay tooling.
  • End-of-line software — flashing, serialization, provisioning, result logging: $15,000 to $60,000 of engineering, not equipment.

The test fixture is a real design project with its own schedule, and starting it two weeks before production is a reliable way to delay launch. Why it deserves an owner from the beginning is argued in production test fixtures.

Documentation, Training, and Validation

The soft costs are real and routinely omitted. Written work instructions with photographs for every station, plus a bill of materials tied to each operation, take 40 to 120 hours of engineering, so $6,000 to $18,000. Operator training runs three to ten days per person, costing $4,000 to $15,000 in wages before the line produces a sellable unit. Validation — running a controlled batch, measuring cycle times, finding the bottleneck — takes one to three weeks of engineering presence, $10,000 to $40,000. That is exactly what a pilot production run is for, and skipping it moves every discovery into the middle of a paid order.

Add inspection gauges, a rework station, packaging equipment (a case sealer is $2,500 to $8,000, a shrink tunnel $6,000 to $20,000), and a labeling and serialization printer at $1,500 to $6,000.

Realistic Totals

  1. Simple manual line — mechanical assembly, basic test: $30,000 to $90,000.
  2. Typical connected consumer product — five to eight stations, functional and safety test, serialization: $120,000 to $350,000.
  3. Semi-automated line with screwdriving robots, dispensing, and inline vision: $400,000 to $900,000.
  4. Fully automated cell with feeding, robotic handling, and integrated test: $1.2M and up.

Where Automation Starts to Pay

The arithmetic is straightforward. Fully burdened US assembly labor is roughly $30 to $48 per hour, so a station that removes 20 seconds of manual work saves about $0.20 per unit. If automating it costs $85,000 and you want a two-year payback, you need roughly 425,000 units in that window before it clears.

That number moves for reasons other than labor. Automation pays far earlier when the operation is a quality risk rather than a time cost: a torque or dispensing step where human variation causes field failures justifies capital well below the labor crossover. It also pays earlier where ergonomics or hiring difficulty make staffing unreliable. The full comparison, including the semi-automated middle ground most products land in, is in manual assembly or an automated line.

The cheapest lever is not capital at all. Every part you delete removes an operation, a fixture, a training step, and a failure mode, and the discipline for doing that is design for assembly. A product redesigned from 48 components to 29 typically drops assembly time by a third and takes two stations out of the budget.

Once the line runs, cycle time per station, first-pass yield, and defect Pareto by operation turn it from a cost center into something that improves, using the methods in statistical process control.

Budget the Line at Design Time

Line cost is decided by the product design, not by the equipment catalog, and the window to change it closes when tooling is cut — a point covered in from prototype to production. Projects House builds assembly process plans, fixture designs, and line budgets for US clients through a global engineering and manufacturing network. Send your product design and target annual volume through our contact form.