CrowdSupply is great - I ran a successful project through them. And I would definitely recommend anyone doing some hardware taking a look.
There are a couple of things to be aware of - everything is shipped to the US and then distributed from there (using Mouser US).
From the project point of view this means, depending on where things are manufactured) tariffs can come into play. The terms of shipping to mouser are delivery duty paid - so it’s the shipper who pays.
For backers it does mean people outside of US can pay quite high shipping costs.
The other thing from a project point of view is that mouser is a distributor. They want a reasonable (around 40%) margin on the things they ship.
With CrowdSupply there are two sets of orders:
Orders placed during the campaign - the project gets the full money (minus fees etc…)
Orders placed after the campaign and any additional bulk orders - the project gets the wholesale price.
Excellent write up! This answered some of my questions that I wasn't really comfortable asking creators. A very (and I mean very) long time ago when people were complaining about the price of software I wrote up a Usenet post on why software costs what it does and enlightened a number of people to the fact that yeah, there are many things you don't think about when you're just looking at the list price.
Presumably the contract doesn't allow you to sell product directly if you wanted too. The other thing I'm curious about is that CrowdSupply does continue to list "buying options" long after the creator has gone away. Which makes me wonder if they have some sort of rights to tooling etc post campaign?
Post campaign mouser will continue to order from the creator to keep their stock levels up (assuming the product is selling!). So although the creator may not be actively promoting the product, they may still be doing production runs.
I need to check the exact wording in my contract - but post campaign you can sell through other channels if you want to (which would allow you to do it directly).
Thanks, one of the things I bought on a campaign was a programmable USB hub from 'Capable Robotics Components' and when I thought, this thing is really useful I need another one, they became impossible to get.
This was a really interesting read! Back in the day a friend and I started a company and Kickstartered a RPi add-on. The kickstarter campaign failed, but we ended up building anyway after one of the silicon manufacturers spotted the project and provided some FoC devices which changed the economics.
We spent oodles of time on it, learned lots, build a fairly simple product but ended up selling it through some of the bigger RPi retailers. It was all an excellent learning experience, and ignoring our time we made about 50p out of the entire batch of a thousand. Factor in our time and it was a complete financial disaster, but we were young and carefree and had fun doing it!
There are a couple of things to be aware of - everything is shipped to the US and then distributed from there (using Mouser US).
From the project point of view this means, depending on where things are manufactured) tariffs can come into play. The terms of shipping to mouser are delivery duty paid - so it’s the shipper who pays.
For backers it does mean people outside of US can pay quite high shipping costs.
The other thing from a project point of view is that mouser is a distributor. They want a reasonable (around 40%) margin on the things they ship.
With CrowdSupply there are two sets of orders:
Orders placed during the campaign - the project gets the full money (minus fees etc…)
Orders placed after the campaign and any additional bulk orders - the project gets the wholesale price.
I wrote a fairly detailed write up of it here: https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro