"The testing and certification industry is odd. In theory, it exists to serve the public good and uphold consumer protection laws. On the other hand, its customers are in the private sector. Normally, market forces would dictate that by now it would be straightforward, fast, and affordable to get your product tested as frequently as desired. However, in reality, the labs are “too busy” to respond or reply very late and generally sound less than eager to work with you. Not to mention, the fees that they quote are rarely palatable to a bootstrapping startup. And yet, working with them is generally required to get your product to market."
Market forces naturally determined this outcome though. If you're big companies you naturally want to limit the threat of new competition. Making compliance more costly achieves this.
I used to work at a place that did some custom hardware development. Usually one-off or very limited run. Any time we fabricated a case and plugged in off-the-shelf devices, certification was not necessary. If we did custom wiring we got ETL certified. I didn't run the process myself but I recall it being easy and not very costly (few thousand?) It's a barrier but a pretty low one. Our electronic work was like advanced amateur level and it still passed with minimal modifications.
> Market forces naturally determined this outcome though. If you're big companies you naturally want to limit the threat of new competition. Making compliance more costly achieves this.
Compliance for basic products isn’t costly, though. It’s a rounding error relative to the wages you have to pay engineers and the costs involved in manufacturing the product.
It is a high cost to certify when you're not paying yourself and you're the only person in your startup/hobby.
Cost of DIY hardware design: 0
Cost of PCBA from China: rougly 100 to 2000 USD depending on complexity and nr of runs.
Cost of DIY firmware and software: 0
Cost of external certification/compliance tests: 5000 to 25000 USD depending on the amount of runs it take to make it pass and what needs to be checked and what the industry is (battery management safety, medical, aerospace, FCC and/or CE, RED and/or others, etc).
So yeah, an RnD department wouldn't really care, but "guy in mom's basement" would.
This. The compliance requirements take out an entire tier of small companies and short run products. This eliminates a lot of potential startups at the first stage.
You don't get quite so many big companies without going through the small company stage. You're limited to VCs and spinoffs of other megacorps.
But I guess everyone is happy with the equilibrium that's actually emerged (buy your unregulated short run electronics from China).
$10k is peanuts for starting a small business in many industries. It does not even buy you a truck. You don't need VC or a megacorp; this is well within the range of standard business loans.
If the project is actually just a hobby, then CE and probably FCC testing is not needed.
If the project is a startup, then the cost of labor is not zero, at least not if people are not deluding themselves (i.e. at least opportunity costs should be considered).
Personally, as a consumer, I'm pretty happy that I can buy e.g. a wireless mouse or a bluetooth speaker and can reasonably assume that they actually work and aren't accidently jammed by some "startup"'s hardware.
> If the project is actually just a hobby, then CE and probably FCC testing is not needed.
That's the entire problem: According to the law, it is! There are extremely few exception, and the exceptions that do exist are essentially useless for hobbyists. Everyone selling small-scale prototypes on websites like Tindie is just rolling the dice and hope they don't get get a life-ruining fine.
There are plenty of $5-$50 trinkets I'd like to design and sell as a hobby to fellow enthusiasts, due to their niche nature probably only a few dozen of each. But there's no way I can afford a $5000-$10.000 testing & certification fee on each one of those, and without that I'd be breaking the law.
You can sell kits, because companies do. Kits are only required to be authorized in very specific rules for specific types of kits. However, devices assembled from kits are not exempt from FCC authorization requirements. Home built devices not assembled from kits do get an exemption. You figure out the contradictions here - i.e. this is not advice.
The FCC has fined people for assembling and selling uncertified radio transmitters from other's kits. Like this guy:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-12-574A1.pdf
Note that the company that sells the kit he was assembling is still selling the same kit that results in an uncertified AM-band transmitter when assembled.
It's easy to blow $500K or more on certification of even a well-designed product, especially if you actually use UL for your testing (never again!) Yep, I've worked at a startup that did that.
If you don't have everythign done in China, certification is a racket: In addition to at least $60-80K minimum (for CE, which helps get UL/ETL if you need them), you'll be paying $5K/Quarter/factory for audits, and $2-5K just to open the report for any changes, including things like changing your company address!
You can't hate the bastards that run this industry enough. I have no problem with complying with reasoniable rules, but I have a big problem with shakedown protection rackets, which is what this is...
Also, by definition, testing and certification companies have a captive market and will tend towards being lazy and exploitative. Any competition that springs up might temporarily improve things but then it too will get used to having a captive market and start sliding in the same direction.
Enforcing basic device safety is hardly regulatory capture. I was part of preparing devices for CE tests, the requirements are essentially: nobody gets killed if the hardware is plugged in, you haven't accidently created an rf transmitter, and if you want to advertise IP67 it should survive being placed under water.
Market forces naturally determined this outcome though. If you're big companies you naturally want to limit the threat of new competition. Making compliance more costly achieves this.