There is a big difference to a company project that has to pay wages/taxes/overheads and non-company project that does not have these costs. Even if a professional engineer or engineers do a project in their spare time it is very different to a company being available behind a project. I could give a longish list of things that won't be available from a solution engineered by even professional people in their spare time. That is in no way any smear of those projects but simple practicality and reality. Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.
While I understand that, the model you provided looks incredibly similar to a single person commercial build around... so I don't want to bitch and did some calc.
The burnin variation including avalon chips comes for me, at around 250€ including chips, VAT, manufacturing in factory that caters from small timers to the german military.
Wages in germany are ridiculously expensive.
So I don't really understand how someone can create a quality product (Including ridiculous German warranty) while doing all this and still make good money. We are talking 44€ vs. 95 Euros. I could understand, 50, 60, even 70 Euros. But more than a double premium on someone who has already hopefully more than a 200% markup?
What I want to say is, I like to invest in premium products. I have money coming towards bitcoin. For me as a customer, what advantages does your product get me compared to other products? I did understand this with GPUs, since your FPGA beats GPUs and others were similarly priced. With Avalon Asics, I don't get the premium.
Then again, sure, at current difficulty you will break even in one month, at further difficulty at 40-50 million you might do it in two to three, totally acceptable. But what advantage does your board have over the Bitburner boards? Or the K384?
Costs can be argued about what is good or bad. I have not been following other Avalon based designs in any depth so anything I say is based on limited knowledge. I think the Burnin boards are using a USB interface and that is one we wanted to get away from. It's not great for a big design as we found out with CM1. When you get to 256 COM ports you are stuffed in Windows and maybe Linux too. The CM3 design will have a controller running Linux and miner software so doesn't need a host as such with those issues. We do have a USB interface but that is for special cases or maintainance.
The K384 I don't know much at all so can't make a comment on what they are doing.
With Avalon chips there are some particular problems with offering warranties.
I'm not saying this as any insult or other bad mouthing of what Avalon have done but wearing my pro hat they are a supplier with next to no track record and barely have any normal business presence or support. Now if you said to most companies like us they wouldn't touch those chips with a 100 mile bargepole. It fails all the business due diligence tests that are normal. So what does that mean in practicality? It means that you might have poor quality in the design or manufacturing. It might also mean non-working chips arriving. It might mean chips don't appear at all. As a business that represents a huge risk in warranty and litigation. It might also mean a lot of support work and costs. Probably worst of all it could be pissed off customers. I certainly don't want Enterpoint being described in the same BFL is currently. So that is the context we set our prices for CM3. Remember also that CM3 is mainly being done as a service to customers because they asked for it and we can do it in tandem with CM4.
ROI is always going to a difficult one. ROI also changes depending on whether you consider it in flat or BTC. A year ago people talked of an exchange rate that might some day exceed $100/coin. We have been 2.5X that over the last few months. That change has made a big difference in flat profit levels. If we went back to $10/coin flat profits might not be a profit.
In BTC you might say 1/10 of last years BTC earnings is now crap. At best Bitcoin mining is a gamble and you back you horse i.e. equipment to make you money. So in context in buying our equipment we think most customers have, or will, make money and hopefully that will continue to be the case.