I was referring to the OG Unity, I don’t know how the next-gen unities came to be and how they are related. I honestly see eskates to be one of the transport methods of the future as they are fairy convenient and efficient. There aren’t all that many active users but there are definitely a lot of inactive/semi-active users like me, not to mention that the esc pricing issue probably plagues the other hobbyist communities as well like the RC car/boat/drone enthusiasts, Electric Scooter communities and etc… It just doesn’t make sense for a 30eur electronics board to cost 300eur and that is why a lot of people sort of look in disgust when you tell them the price of a board and wouldn’t really even consider looking into getting/making a board. I dunno, it just doesn’t make any sense to me.
The price is also related to the costs of all other aspects of running a business besides the article itself. Design effort, providing warranty/support, ongoing innovation, administration, managing suppliers, marketing etc. etc.
This is a recurring theme. Many vendors don’t price all of this stuff in and hit the wall pretty quickly.
I am not saying that they should be sold for 30 eur, if the parts cost is 25 eur. I would happily pay 150 eur for a dual vesc esc that cost 30 eur to make. It is a niche market. At 300, I feel like it is a huge rip off. Like… Apple, the company who sold a monitor stand for 1000$, sells their iPhones at 1k eur with 250eur component costs. Thats a 400% markup to cover the other costs and they still make huge profits. Are you implying that researching, marketing, sourcing components, supporting, designing and manufacturing a smartphone is easier for a business than an ESC with 6 capacitors and 40 mosfets? Im pressing X to doubt. My example might not be quite relevant, but the idea is there.
Build your own cheap focer 
Or buy 1 off me, I’ll include the sketchy one for free
The go foc DV4 is 151€ for a dual 
Yes, but it seems to be even worse than my 2x4.12 flipsky escs. And its not worse because they couldn’t make it 200A cont, Its worse so that they can sell it at a lower price, so that the 200A is justified at 300 eur.
go foc retro is even cheaper if it wasn’t sold out 
Well then you’ve found quite the business opportunity then, haven’t you!? Best of luck! Hopefully you will succeed where others have failed.
Its cuz its the least understandable part to a baseline user. How does it work? Iunno. Magic maybe. Heres $250 so i dont have to think about the complicated parts. Motors eat electrons and go spinny spinny zoom zoom. Battery is just a buncha double a’s welded together, plus a bms. But the esc is a little brain, and takes some more technical knowledge to really understand, compared to the rest of this stuff.
Rarely does physical cost alone determine final pricing. You have to take into account the time for development and testing. A big factor is also software/firmware development and testing.
That random user you’re referring to has a PHD in electrical engineering so I don’t think he’s like us mere mortals.
I guess I came off in a negative manner towards him. The dude is most probably more than smart and its obviously not just soldering two wires together. I do not know what experience he has.
The software is open source, the hardware can be sort of easily be examined and the parts can be easily sourced. (assumptions)
My question is what is preventing someone with an interest in engineering/electronics from creating their own high performance vesc esc based on already existing ones… for 50eur? Not as a commercial product, but for themselves?
All the schematics and software is open source so should be easy for you like you say. No one is stopping you. Good luck.
I’d say just try it and figure it out experimentally. If it works you get a esc for super cheap, and if it doesn’t it’s just 50£ right?
I am theory crafting as the price of existing solutions doesn’t seem justified to me. I personally do not have an interest in engineering/electronics to the degree of making it on my own. I put my time elsewhere and i have invested in different equipment. I am genuinely curious if there are people who actually have invested in the tools necessary to assemble an ESC (not specifically to make an ESC but for their hobby) and if it is possible to assemble an ESC on your own for 50 eur and if it is… how is it that not even chinese companies are able to streamline production of it? At the end of the day, my real question is “What is the reason that makes ESCs so expensive?”. I am not saying that they should not be expensive, I am saying that to me it looks like their price is quite high. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the price looks like to me, but I am still curious as to where do the costs come from to have them sold at these prices.
Edit : I am still asking because the main arguments I saw in the comments above were “research and development”, but then the same people said “the research is already publically available and is open sourced”. These two statements contradict eachother.
Is it important that both vescs have the same PPM settings, even if only one has the received connected? ( 2x single vesc connected via can)
Not a thing. 
A few hundred hours of free time for development and testing, perhaps a few hundred euros total for prototypes (some will blow up for sure), and someone could have a $50 ESC.
But if I did something like that to create a product it would have to undergo several months of testing. I cannot assume a PCB I reverse-engineered, hopefully well, will work in many different setups. If I designed a new ESC then the testing could easily take a year.
Every moment of that is one I can’t make money doing something else. I need to recoup that lost income, up to tens of thousands of dollars, when selling that product.
If I am only selling a few hundred devices then that is a lot of money per device I am adding for testing. Add onto this the insurance I would need, all the time spent answering questions, packaging materials, etc., That time and expense also adds up.
For an individual developing for themselves the actual costs can be low. But for a company (or an individual selling these) that needs to develop and test to a much higher standard the time spent creating this ESC is huge. That costs money they need to get back.
Hmmm, that answer still feels lacking to me. Again, I can be and probably am wrong, since the prices aren’t what I would expect them to be thus proving that my views are wrong. If one has experience with electronics and/or PCB design, if one has access to schematics, if one has access to the VESC software, why would one need that much time of developing/testing? To me, your answer can be summarized as “an engineer needs a year of full-time work (40h/w) to prepare a consumer ready ESC, using open sourced schematics, software and tested components” and that doesn’t sound right. If we were talking about someone like me, sure, I can definitely spend 40hrs a week on a project like this and it will take me a year or more as I don’t have previous knowledge, but an engineer? Additionally, the potential losses that you accumulate by working on the product and not working an actual job vary from country to country. I doubt that the average engineer in Bulgaria for example makes more than 10-13k$/year and wages in places like India/China aren’t USA levels either, yet it’s not like there aren’t people with enviable skills in these countries.
Dude, you’re very humble to ask the question in the Noob thread when you evidently know so much on the subject.
Holy shit I checked and that’s actually the median wage for electrical engineers there – wtf?
Respectfully…you might have to accept that for some companies and situations that this is the case. 
Some companies might just tack on a bunch of dollars to the price, just because they can. But that certainly isn’t what all companies do.
What sounds right to you though? What do you base your estimate on?
A commercially released product, versus one created for your own use, is a completely different situation.
When I designed a commercial electronic load for battery pack testing a few years ago I tested several prototypes for 1,000 hours each at full power. Several others were cycled on/off for several minutes at full power over 5,000 times to test for thermal fatigue (a very real issue). Three others were tested for ESD (static shock) resistance and then drop tested.
Three of the units used for full power testing then had their connectors tested 500 times, inserting and removing the cables after fully tightening and loosening the screws, to make sure the connector’s soldered connections never fatigued and failed due to the connector (visibly) twisting.
Several other units were sent out for beta testing since customers can always come up with some creative ways to get products to fail.
None of the devices failed in testing but it was all necessary to ensure that I had designed a product to the level of reliability I wanted. This development and testing took over a year.
If I had 100 units in testing I certainly could have done it faster but I had to wait for some units to free up before starting new other testing. I guess a company could make the decision to speed up testing that I couldn’t afford to do.
For that particular situation, using an existing board layout and software, you might not. But you still need a bunch of time. It will not happen in a month.
And you still might have enclosure dev time/costs, packaging costs, insurance, shipping, customer support, etc. All these add up.
Of course, but you can say with certainty that the products your were referring to (with high prices) had low development costs?
I’m not saying that all high prices are merely due to actual design/development costs. I’m only saying that I think these costs can be much higher than you think and that some ESC’s which you might feel are overpriced are actually priced quite fairly.
Others can certainly have had their price boosted up “just because they can”.