It's not that mind blowing. It is when you first start looking at fab houses. But after enough time you get an idea of what's out there at hobby-targeted to commercial-targeted PCB fabs.
BatchPCB has a $10 setup fee but it's only $2.50 per square inch for 2-layers or $8 per square inch for 4-layers. They submit their batch about once a week or so. 4-layer boards are about once every 5-6 weeks.
do I get for these prices.
But here's the thing...it's easy to get blinded by the seemingly lower prices sometimes of these "middle-man" operations. Just remember than if you need some large boards or a few of the same board it very rapidly gets cheaper to go straight to a real board house. YOu just have to browse a bunch of them to see where the best deals are.
Like Sierra Proto Express has special offers for new customers (ie. less than 5 orders) for 2, 4 layer boards with 5-day turnaround. THere's a 4-board minimum and it costs $29 per 2-layer board or $49 per 4-layer board. But this is a flat cost for the board up to 50 square inches. So if you do the math, you'll see that it can be much cheaper to go this route if you need even 3 of the same board, especially if they are big boards.
Other than that new customer special offer, their regular discounted service for 2,4, and 6 layer boards which they call "No-Touch" might seem expensive off the start. But most of the costs are in that setup fee and only increase slightly for rather significant increases in board size or quantity. You'd almost always choose the longest lead time too just to make it much much cheaper (like 10 days) which is pretty fast.
I ran a bunch of quotes for their No-Touch service with 10-day turn around time which is the longest and cheapest possible (not their special customer offer since that's just a flat rate for every board up to 50 sq-in):
one 2x2" 2-layer-> $72
three 2x2" 2-layer-> $93
five 2x2" 2-layer-> $145
one 3x3" 2-layer -> $78
two 3x3" 2-layer ->$93
three 3x3" 2-layer ->$99
five 3x3" 2-layer -> $150
-------------------------------------
one 2x2" 4-layer-> $119
two 2x2" 4-layer-> $141
three 2x2" 4-layer-> $149
five 2x2" 4-layer-> $229
one 3x3" 4-layer-> $124
two 3x3" 4-layer-> $145
three 3x3" 4-layer-> $155
five 3x3" 4-layer-> $236
-------------------------------------
one 2x2" 6-layer-> $228
three 2x2" 6-layer -> $286
one 5x5" 6-layer -> $294
three 5x5" 6-layer -> $316
-------------------------------------
If you do the math you'll see that the middle-man services are definately cheaper for the 2x2" 2-layer boards. But if you do some more math you see once you need 2 or more of the same PCB that is 3x3" or larger, it becomes possible to gets it cheaper to go with the discounted PCB service direct from the board house. And the larger the boards are or the more you need, the exponentially cheaper it gets. We aren't talking about hundreds of boards here. THe difference might be as small as wanting to get 5 boards instead of 3. And usually from a board house you want to get at least 3 boards since it costs the same as getting 1 or 2 boards because of that initial setup cost.
DorkBotPDX is quite a bit more expensive than BatchPCB actually. DorkBotPDx is only cheaper if your boards are going 3sq-in or less. At 3sq-in the cost is about the same as BatchPCB rapidly gets cheaper after that since it's per area pricing is half that of DorkBotPDX, even though there is a setup fee.
At around the break even points I keep talking about between the DorkBot, BatchPCB, and Sierra Proto Express, DorkBot is around $35 more expensive than Sierra Proto Express while Batch PCB is around 20-$35 cheaper than Sierra Proto Express.
You literally are supposed to get three boards, professionally fabbed, for the cost of a single board for a mere $5/sq inch, with no setup fee?! I have been using ExpressPCB because I am using their download design package and no one else I looked into was noticeably different in costs. I am doing a 5.2 x 5.5 inch (28.6 SqIn) 2-sided board now that will cost me just under $300 if I have ExPCB do it (for two boards). But, even after I pay ExPCB their $60 fee to translate their proprietary files to a format I can use anywhere, and pay DorkBots $143 for their fab service for THREE boards, I still save $100!
It's 40% cheaper with BatchPCB compared to DorkBotPDX for a 29sq-in board. DorkBot PDX has a really high unit area cost for 2-layer boards. Batch PCB's $8 per sq-in for 4-layers is ridiculously overpriced compared to $2.50 per sq-in for 2-layers. But compared to DorkBot's $5 per sq-in for 2-layers, $8 per sq-in for 4 layers seems downright reasonable. If you look it logically, it should be $2.50 for 2-layers, $5 for 4-layers and $8 for 6-layers so with DorkBot PDX you're getting charged almost double!
If you only want one board then either BatchPCB or Sierra Proto Express's discounted service (Nocalled -Touch) with 10-day turnaround would be cheapest. It costs $82-$85 between the two. If you need 2 boards, it's definately cheaper to go with the Sierra Proto Express as it costs $104 where as BatchPCB would cost almost 2x as much (since it's priced by board area). If you need 4 boards it's cheapest to go with Sierra's new customer special offer (since they have the 4-board minimum, and the turn around time is only 5 days.