Entropic's statements have been really vague but I don't think they "discounted" anything. They couldn't charge their full labour cost because they had a signed SOW. So they may have put in more hours than estimated and weren't able to bill their usual hourly rate, but that's why we have SOWs - to protect the clients in the case of overages. If they wanted a time and materials style contract they could have bid that.
They also said they didn’t take into account anything outside the board, because only Defcon had access to that data.
It’s perfectly possible for Entropic to be calculating to a $100k total cost (for the board), while Defcon is calculating the cost for everything (case/lanyard, etc.), and gets to $160k for the entire project, then says they’re 60% over budget.
I imagine Entropic was discounting their bills to say within the 100K, while Defcon already felt they were over.
Injection molds for that nice clear case can't be cheap too. Has four parts, clips, undercuts, and not tiny. They're not making that shell for under $100k total at any volume.
I didn't see the case, so this is speculation based in my knowledge with injection molding.
A fairly simple mold costs 5-10k, a complex mold 10-20k. Since this is a limited production run, I would argue that they didn't need the highest tolerances.
Thus my guess would be ~$50k for the molds and ~$5 for the parts.
I was mistaken about parts count, it's just front and back. But both sides of both halves seem polished to show components inside, and it's assembled by finger sized clips around the edge instead of bosses and screws. I thought those clips might need slide core things. Or have those come down in cost in the last few decades?
Entropic also pointed out that they made new molds to take their logo off the case. How much did that cost? Why not just pay Entropic with that money?
The whole thing stinks...
There was never any question as to whether DEF CON was capable of further funding Entropic. They fired Entropic, which mooted the question of how to find additional money for them.
If both statements are true, then why would DEFCON order them to stop work? Unless I misunderstood their statement, Entropic claims they were willing to be paid only what was agreed to up-front, and not for any over-budget work they'd been doing.
This doesn't really add up to me. Ultimately we'll never know for sure. Personally I'm inclined to believe Entropic more on this one (though I'm sure neither party is blame-free, regardless of where the bulk of fault lies), but I can see why you'd be more inclined to trust DEFCON's response.
(I just don't consider "DEFCON made a falsifiable claim and Entropic didn't" to be strong evidence either way.)
People keep talking about this "stop work" thing. DEF CON fired their contractor. That's all that means. There's no particular ceremony to "stop work".
> EE: keeps trying to send invoices totaling $300K
Where are you getting that, though? EE says:
> Once a month, we billed for our work and submitted an updated estimated per badge final cost - committing as costs built to discount our work as necessary in order to hit DEFCON’s per unit cost targets.
And:
> We billed DEFCON for our most recent work, discounting our labor by 25% in order to meet the agreed upon targets.
So it sounds like they were billing with an expected total of $200k, not anything higher. Perhaps they were listing in their invoice all the actual costs, but then had a "discount" line item to bring the cost back down, but if so... so what?
