That's actually quite scary. If you sell 'close to cost' then your margins are going to be razor thin even with just a little overhead it might not be viable.
AFAICT they are a registered charity with the goal of promoting computer science education, so I suspect large profit margins matter less than if they were a business.
I think they should increase the single unit cost to $45 or higher (49 or 63). Have it a vote on the main page so people feel like they have some input, the higher cost can support discounts for bulk buys and other non-profits (think give one get one). Explain the rational for the price increase on the poll. The geeks that are making single purchases can definitely pay the higher price. Have a discount kick in @ qty 10 or 20 (down to $35). The at cost (which is never really @ cost, ever) discount shouldn't kick in till either non-profit status or qty 100.
----
You are going to have a problem meeting demand. And some for profit shop is going to use these as digital signage and suck up all the supply. Beware of unintended consequences, everyone that buys them isn't going to be doing good in the world. Capitalism is faceless and cares about us much gravity or water.
----
Another option is to have a classroom in a box package where you sell 30, power supplies, keyboards and an app that runs on all operating systems so you can DD pre-canned images onto end user supplied SD cards (point them at preferred cards on newegg).
I think this is a terrible idea, unless that price only applied to buyers in first world countries. At $25 for the board + shipping to South Africa + power supplies I can afford twice the boards I would buy. And even at $25, I can't buy as many as I would actually need.
I plan on giving them to interested school kids from the local squatter camp (slum for non-South Africans) and hopefully teaching them a bit of programming and general computer skills. The charities that service these kids have a hard time getting them food, so getting them to shell out for computers (even at $25ea) is a complete non-starter.
Since I will be paying for every single one myself, and will be scrounging up the rest of the parts wherever I can, an extra $20 - $40 would make a massive difference to me.
Then under my plan if you bought 10 you would get the discount. When you get the cheap nearly at cost price so do the people who won't be doing good in the world. How do you differentiate them? What if I put in an order 1000 and hoovered them all up for in store digital signage? I am preventing 1000 kids from getting access to education and Raspberry gets nothing in return.
Good points. Still, it would be terrible if they ended up not surviving because of pricing it too low. Even a charity has to somehow make ends meet and if they end up going out of business everybody loses. I really hope they can make it work at the price points indicated but I'd rather have them a bit more expensive than not at all.
Exactly my take as well. The organism needs to survive and 100% altruistic organisms don't. If they sell at a profit then they can grow and more low cost education can spread.
Are you planning on making these available to the public at this price point?
I personally would be tempted to hang on to the $25 price point for non-profit/educational institutions, and sell them to the general public at $50 a pop.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really hoping you do. But I've been bit too many times before by vaporware, so until you actually ship, I'm going to continue saying 'IF'.
It looks like the Raspberry Pi Foundation is actually Broadcom. There's a Broadcom logo on their board, and this Eben Upton fellow appears to work for Broadcom: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ebenupton
My hunch is that they'll hit the low price point by selling it at a loss, with the expectation that it will be worth it in the long run as a marketing effort for Broadcom. That seems a little skeezy to me.
On the other hand, there could be a lot worse marketing efforts than flooding schools with cheap Linux boards.
[Edit: see response below from liz_upton, who convinces me I'm wrong. I do still think it's weird that they're "having a hell of a time" distinguishing themselves from Broadcom, but haven't tried removing the Broadcom logo from their product yet. If I were really a conspiracy theorist, I would point out the Broadcom logo is a sinc function, and the integral of sinc is pi. But that would be crazy!]
The Raspberry Pi foundation is not Broadcom - we're having a hell of a time getting that message out. We're an independent charity.
Our director does work for Broadcom, which meant that we were able to get a foot in the door to discuss buying chips from them in much smaller numbers than they're usually prepared to sell people (their normal sales to a single customer are in the tens of millions range) once we'd explained the aims of the charity. They did allow to use their parts library to make the alpha boards which you can see in the video. Outside that, we're not receiving any other help from them (we source all our own parts for the final boards). All of us have day jobs and are doing all our Raspberry Pi work on a volunteer basis because we believe it's a project that can make a real difference. (I'm volunteering full-time - I'm freelance, so I've been able to put other work aside for at least the rest of the year.)
We're not selling at a loss. This isn't a Broadcom marketing exercise. Our relationship with Broadcom is one of customer/supplier - and that's it.
There is a lot to be learned from the design, even if you can't buy the SoC. Other chips may be compatible with existing footprints, and you could build extra features onto the current design.
Additionally, having a schematic would make OS development a lot easier. The information can be obtained from the currently published source code, or at $25 it would be cheap to sacrifice one to a hot-air gun and generate some schematics.
There is always a point, even if it isn't immediately obvious. People are curious and inventive and wonderful - they will surprise you! Just because you can't see somebody immediately being able to build this board, doesn't mean that the knowledge your work contains isn't useful, or won't be useful in the future.
Besides, you have no reason not to. Couldn't hurt, right? And it would make the open hardware community promote you even more.
I think loss leaders are fine. The skeezy part, to my mind, is a company representing themselves as an educational foundation.
However, liz_upton claims that they really aren't part of Broadcom, despite the logo on the board. If they're really just a bunch of volunteers supporting Linux in education, they have my support 100%.
