Just out of curiosity, did you investigate how much more expensive it would be to have molds made somewhere in the West? Is that even available at all for relatively small and inexpensive molds/projects/orders like yours?
I made the move from software to building electronic products in 2019, and while there are notable exceptions, here are some things I learned about Western Industrial Suppliers:
1) They are unlikely to work with you at all unless you anticipate high volume orders (thousands at least, they prefer 100's of thousands).
2) Price: Get a quote from a Chinese supplier, double it and add a zero.
3) Lead Time: Get a lead time quote from a Chinese Supplier. Add shipping + customs slack. Double it and add another 30% for the excuses that are going to come.
4) Quality: Surface finish, dimensional accuracy, materials and process will be poor and no one will care. Refunds will be extremely difficult to get with Western suppliers.
5) Efficiency: The ordering process is usually very efficient with Asian companies. Western suppliers will drag you through a fully manual quoting process that involves days, weeks or months of bullshit back and forth while they wait for a slot in their broken production process to then rush you into commitments for.
5) Labor: Many "Western Suppliers" sub everything out to a random, lowest bidder in China anyway, even after all the bullshit.
6) There are now some 3rd party service aggregators (e.g., Protolabs and Xometry) that are attempting to collect rent on Chinese labor. They charge Western prices, offer Western lead times and Western levels of support, then sub the work out to random shops in China with poor communication, no consistency, bad incentives and unacceptable results.
7) There are some truly incredible, honest, hard-working Western Suppliers doing truly incredible work. If you've found one, do not take them for granted (e.g., Digikey, Craft Cloud, Adafruit, Sparkfun, Make Augusta, and more).
Many Western manufacturers are being kept afloat by the extreme largesse of the defense, aerospace and medical industries who each have specific, reasonable problems with offshoring.
Were it not for those supply chain constraints, these companies would almost all disappear overnight.
That's a terrifying proposition, as we're in no position to compete with China.
Yeah, China earned a bad rap in many ways, but there are lots of companies there that have figured out how to do excellent business with westerners. See JLCPCB and PCBWay as two examples.
Chinese can manufacturer a wide range of products, high-end or low-end. Budget matters. Do not expect high quality things if you are ordering for dollar tree.
Not the topic poster, but speaking from the similar experience, the cost can be as low as $4,000 in China for the size of these parts. In USA/Canada it would start with a $60k minimum, and with a 6 month timeline instead of 1.
And 9 times out of ten, the local fab is making their moulds in China anyway.
This is similar to my experiences, the really good ones still in the US have heavily specialized on high-end boutique orders. They can be very competent but also very non competitive for any normal work.
Same with with US based PCB shops. They all want to do high dollar ITAR restricted boards for govt contractors.
There is a middle ground. US sub shops that oversee captive Chinese operations with their own crew and keep you in the loop. This worked well for my personal projects and wasn't too horrendous. About 16k for a simple design that I could've had done with our work team for about 8k. But I never had to fly over, play WeChat tag in Mandarin, and I got PowerPoint DFM updates regularly.
