Speeddemon said:
I cannot for all the sake of the world believe that it's NESCESSARY to ask $99 for a cable-tester, when the circuitry isn't very hard...
It's nice that people recognize that there is R&D cost to this. Usually people just add up what they figure the components cost and think a company should charge that amount for their product. But there is a lot more than just R&D and component costs that go into it too. There's labour, cost of machinery, rent, debt servicing, administrative salaries and expenses, legal expenses, heating and power, shipping, etc., etc., etc. The fact is that a large company like
Behringer can do things like ship their manufacturing to China, thereby significantly reducing labour costs. They can negotiate lower rent and lower interest charges. They can afford to purchase larger and more efficient machinery. There are many, many things that they can do to reduce the per-unit costs of a cable tester.
On the other hand, a small company often can't do these things. On top of that, Behringer will have much better distribution channels than this Swizz Army company, and therefore move much, much more product. That again results in lower per-unit costs. Even at current pricing levels, I wouldn't be suprised if Behringer was making more profit per unit that this Swizz Army company. Similarly, I wouldn't be suprised if matching Behringer's prices would force Swizz Army into a negative bottom line, and ultimately put it out of business.
So, it's certainly discouraging to a smaller company to have a large company like Behringer wait for it to come up with something, swipe the design, and then start selling massive amounts of product at a price that the smaller company can't possibly compete with. If you look at all of the facts, I think the complaint essentially becomes not one of "Swizz Army is gouging us", but one of "A small company like Swizz Army shouldn't try to compete with a large company like Behringer". That may actually be a legitimate point. If a small company can't compete with a big one on some basis (product quality, price, service, etc.), then they probably shouldn't be in business. But when the big one is capitalizing on a design swiped from the smaller one, knowing full well that the smaller one can't afford to do anything about it, that's not really a level playing field.