PCB Panels with small PCB's and VCut Grooves

In the JLCPCB Help Center docs, the minimum dimensions for PCB's in a v-cut panel is 15mm on either size. Thus, if any side is less than 15mm, an additional charge is applied and the charge varies by dimension. Smaller sides, bigger fee's. The full and up to date fee schedule can be viewed here.

The rationale for the additional charge is the extra labor and lower speeds required to achieve v-cuts on small PCBs... I guess that's reasonable!

In my case, I had not known about this until after the design had a seemingly "random" supplemental charge slapped on the order. But after chatting with the polite and patient help chat operator (maybe an AI bot?) for a bit, they kindly guided me to the Help Center and explained the charge.

Thus if you're designing a PCB, take a few minutes and try to find supporting docs regarding the manufacturing process to help guide your design to be the most cost effective and easy to manufacture. You fab will thank you... and in many cases, so will your wallet!

The story starts out with this humbly small 8mm x 10mm PCB which will simply hold a USB-C connector and has M3 thru hole. The board serves as a mount for a small USB-C device. Because of economies of scale and the fact that it will be made overseas and shipping is a dominant expense, I wanted to have a few hundred of these made in one go.

The obvious choice would be to panelize them and pack them together like sardines. The panel ended up being 8 columns x 12 rows for a total of 96 PCB's with panel dimensions of approx. 86mm x 96mm. I figured this should be no problem since it was fairly large panel, relative to the PCB... but that ended up not being the case!