How much does industrial product development cost?

Most companies that call us ask one question before any other: what will this cost? The honest answer is a range, and the range depends on five things that have little to do with how beautiful the product is. This article explains those five things and gives the ranges we actually quote.

The short answer

For a physical product that needs industrial design, mechanical engineering and preparation for manufacturing, our projects fall into three bands:

• Around 30,000 euros. A single, mostly mechanical product with few parts, a known manufacturing process and a client who already knows what it should do. A redesign of an existing product often sits here.
• Around 60,000 euros. A new product with several moulded parts, some electronics to package, user testing, and a manufacturing handover including supplier selection.
• 120,000 euros and above. A product family, a device with regulatory requirements, or anything where the first question is still "what should this be?" and the last is "which factory, at what unit cost?"

Those numbers cover design and engineering fees. They do not cover tooling, certification or the first production run, which we come back to below.

If you want a cheaper way to find out which band you are in, a two-week discovery sprint of around 10,000 euros produces a scoped plan and a budget you can take to your board. Most of our larger projects started that way.

What drives the number

1. How many questions are still open

A client who arrives with a validated concept, a target price and a list of must-have features buys engineering. A client who arrives with an insight and a market buys strategy first, then design, then engineering. Both are legitimate. The second one costs more and takes longer, because the early decisions are the expensive ones to get wrong.

We ask three questions in the first call: who is this for, what must it do, and what should it cost in the shop. If two of the three have firm answers, you are already saving money.

2. Part count and the processes behind them

Every part has to be designed, detailed, toleranced and sourced. A product with three injection-moulded parts and a handful of fasteners is a different project from one with twelve moulded parts, two die-cast parts, a circuit board, a battery, a display and a cable assembly.

Process matters as much as count. Sheet metal and machining forgive late changes. Injection moulding does not: once the tool is cut, a change costs weeks and real money. That is why we spend more engineering hours on moulded parts, and why products built around them cost more to develop and less to produce.

3. Electronics and software

We are an industrial design and mechanical engineering studio. When a product has electronics, we design around them: packaging, thermal and sealing constraints, assembly, and the coordination with your electronics partner or one of ours. That coordination is real work. A connected product adds a meaningful share of engineering effort compared with a purely mechanical one, mostly in packaging iterations and prototype rounds.

4. How much testing the product needs

A chair needs a load test. A stroller needs a safety standard, drop tests, pinch-point checks and a lot of parents using it. A medical device needs a documented design history and verification against requirements. Each step up adds prototype rounds, test time and documentation. Nobody should skip them; they should be in the budget from day one.

5. Where and how it will be made

Preparing a product for a European supplier you already work with is one job. Finding, qualifying and briefing a factory in China from scratch is another, and it is the one where most development budgets quietly double. We run that work from our Shanghai office, which is why we can price it rather than guess it.

What the fees do not include

Three costs sit outside design and engineering fees, and they are often larger:

• Tooling. An injection mould costs anywhere from a few thousand to many tens of thousands of euros, depending on part size, steel grade, cavity count and where it is made. A product with eight moulded parts needs eight tools.
• Certification. CE, UKCA, FCC, medical or child-product standards each carry test-lab fees and, more importantly, the engineering time to pass them the first time.
• The first production run. Minimum order quantities, pilot batches and the quality work around them.

We put these in every proposal as separate lines, so you can see the full picture before you commit to the design work.

How we charge

We work in fixed-fee phases: strategy, design, engineering, manufacturing. Each phase ends with a handshake: you see the deliverables before the next phase starts, and you can stop or change direction at every gate. No phase is a surprise, and no invoice arrives for work you have not seen.

Three ways to keep the number down

1. Decide what the product is not. The cheapest feature is the one you remove in week two.
2. Bring your unit cost target to the first meeting. It changes material and process choices immediately.
3. Prototype to learn, not to impress. A cardboard model that answers a question is worth more than a rendered animation that avoids one.

Where to start

If you have a product in mind and want a real number rather than a range, send us a short description. We will tell you which band you are in and what a discovery sprint would answer. There is no charge for that first conversation.