PCB assembly in the Netherlands: EMS, Aisler, JLCPCB or DeltaProto?

You need a prototype made and assembled, and you need it this month. In the Netherlands and Belgium you have five routes: a classic EMS company, Eurocircuits and the other European online services, Aisler, a Chinese web shop such as JLCPCB, or a proto lab like us. This article is written by DeltaProto, so you know who is talking. The facts come from the suppliers themselves and were checked in October 2026. The honest short answer: it depends on the phase you are in. A final design going into series production belongs at an EMS; a one-off hobby board belongs at JLCPCB. In between is where it gets interesting.

The short answer: five routes compared

Route 1: the Dutch EMS company, set up for series production

The Netherlands has about 60 EMS companies, with a combined turnover that ABN Amro estimated in June 2026 at €1.4 to 1.7 billion. Most turn over less than €10 million, and according to the bank many of them operate in the low-volume, high-mix segment, from 1 to 2,500 pieces. At the top are Neways (Son), Prodrive Technologies (Son), VDL TBP Electronics (Dirksland) and Benchmark (Almelo): large, system-oriented companies that build complex modules for OEMs in the semiconductor, medical and industrial sectors. They work through NPI programmes, not web orders. Below them is the regional EMS, mostly with 20 to 150 employees: Variass (Veendam), Ellage (De Krim), Anubiss (Eindhoven), Global Electronics (Haaksbergen), Cimar (Veenendaal), Expice (Zwaag) and others. Most list ISO 9001 and work to IPC-A-610 without naming a class; you will find ISO 13485 at Cimar, Variass and Global Electronics, AQAP 2110 at Variass, and AS9100 only at the big players Prodrive, VDL TBP and Benchmark. They all make custom quotes and would prefer a prototype to turn into a series.

How it works: a sales engineer sends a quote within a few days, with NRE costs for stencil, setup, programming and test fixtures, recovered over the production run. Minimum order and lead time are rarely published. The exceptions: Global Electronics aims for a quote within 5 days and a prototype within 15 working days; Expice states "within 14 days in 90% of cases"; Ellage mentions series of 10 to 20,000 pieces and accepts customer-supplied parts. Alongside the EMS companies, a few small Dutch proto shops quote online for a handful of boards: ProTass in Eindhoven has a calculator for up to 5 boards, in 24 hours to 10 days, parts excluded; Proto-Service in Hengelo makes series of up to 100 pieces and accepts your own parts and boards. They are the exception, not the rule.

What an EMS is set up for: many identical boards in a row, with traceability, testing and documentation. Every changeover costs money, so the small order that keeps changing gets pushed back. That is not unwillingness; it is simply how a production line works.

Pros: certified processes, test engineering, box build, conformal coating, and room to grow to thousands of pieces.

Cons: no instant price; a quote takes days; setup costs that make five boards disproportionately expensive; a change after the first board means a new quote.

Choose this if: the design is final, you need a few hundred boards or more, or you need ISO 13485, AQAP or AS9100 in writing.

Route 2: Eurocircuits, Beta Layout and myProto, the European online services

Eurocircuits is the European pioneer of the pool service: head office in Mechelen, PCB production in Baesweiler (Germany) and Felsőtárkány near Eger (Hungary), assembly in Erkelenz (Germany) and Hungary. You upload Gerber X3, ODB++ or your KiCad or Eagle files directly, run them through the PCB Visualizer, add BOM and CPL, and see the price immediately. Assembly from 1 piece, small series up to 50, stencil included, IPC-A-610 Class 2 and Class 3 on request. Parts are supplied turnkey: from its own stock for commonly used parts, the rest bought per order from regular distributors, including Digi-Key, Mouser, Farnell, RS, TME and Würth Elektronik.

Stated lead time: 1 to 5 assembled boards in 6 working days via the PCB Proto service (3 for the board, 3 for assembly); the pool services take 10. Two things are fixed: Eurocircuits only assembles boards it made itself, and its principle is "right first time". The DFM check in the PCB Visualizer runs before you order, and questions go by e-mail to a staff member.

Beta Layout (Aarbergen, Germany) does the same from its own German factory: 1 to 50 boards, a free stencil with every PCB-POOL order, your own parts welcome. myProto (Nivelles, Belgium) gives a price within seconds after registration, promises 5 working days turnkey with parts from Farnell, Digi-Key, Mouser, RS, Arrow and Verical, states no minimum, accepts your own bare PCB and allows no changes after the order.

Pros: production in the EU, minimum order of 1, instant price, strong DFM check, certified process.

Cons: at small quantities a multiple of the Chinese price (see the price table further down); no assembly of boards from another factory; supplying your own parts is discouraged; 50 pieces maximum.

Choose this if: you want a standard board right first time, in a certified European process, without surprises.

Route 3: Aisler, the Dutch platform that manufactures in Germany

Aisler is, on paper, the only Dutch online pool service: AISLER B.V. is registered in Lemiers, right by the German border, and physical goods go to its GmbH in Aachen. Aisler has no factory of its own: it runs the platform and the logistics centre, and boards and assembly come from a network of partners, "manufactured and delivered from Germany" and, according to Aisler, entirely within Europe. Aisler does not say which factories these are.

Amazing Assembly, the assembly service: from 1 assembled board (bare boards come in sets of 3), SMD and THT, 0201, BGA down to 0.4 mm pitch, double-sided, delivered in panels by default. Parts come from linked distributors with live stock and pricing: Würth, TI, Mouser, Digi-Key, Farnell, Arrow and LCSC; whatever is left over after production is shipped to you with the boards. Your own parts cost 15 euro per unique part number. There is no fixed order fee (job fee). Its strongest card is the workflow: one-click ordering from KiCad, direct uploads from Altium, Eagle and Fusion, and a Rendering Guarantee: Aisler builds exactly what the viewer shows.

The board always comes from Aisler itself, from a fixed menu: FR4, 2 layers at 1.6 mm, 4 layers at 0.8 or 1.6 mm, 6 and 8 layers at 1.6 mm, 35 or 70 µm copper, HASL or ENIG, through vias of 0.25 to 0.45 mm only. Blind, buried, micro and tented vias are not supported, and plugged or filled vias, which you need for a BGA with via-in-pad, fall outside the pool service; Aisler quotes those separately on request. The stackup is published down to the prepreg, so you can design to it; supplying your own stackup is not possible.

Stated lead time on the status page in September 2026: Blitz 9 to 12 business days for a 2-layer assembly and 11 to 12 for 4 layers; the standard service 18 business days, materials included. Aisler itself says that one part with a long lead time can hold up an otherwise complete order.

Pros: European invoice, minimum order of 1, parts from Digi-Key and Mouser, the best CAD integration on this list, low fixed costs per revision.

Cons: you do not know which factory made your board; DFM checks are automated, with no human review; inspection on prototypes is manual, AOI on request, X-ray not mentioned; no published certifications; a fixed stackup menu, without blind, buried or filled vias unless quoted separately; the order is fixed at checkout and later changes may be charged.

Choose this if: the design is simple to moderate, the BOM comes from Digi-Key or Mouser, and one-click ordering from KiCad is worth more to you than an engineer on the phone.

Route 4: JLCPCB, with PCBWay as a comparable option

JLCPCB is based in Shenzhen and is a sister company of the distributor LCSC and the CAD package EasyEDA. That is what it all revolves around: the assembly service is built around the LCSC catalogue. About 700 "basic" parts are permanently loaded in the machines, at no extra charge. Everything else in LCSC stock is "extended", and for those you pay feeder fees per unique part number, per order. Parts LCSC does not carry can be bought by JLCPCB from global distributors for your private library, adding 9 to 20 business days and various handling fees; those parts can only be used for assembly and are not shipped to you. Anyone looking for a JLCPCB alternative in Europe is usually doing so for this reason.

There are two tiers: Economic (single-sided, 2 to 50 boards, 0402 and up, BGA 0.5 mm) and Standard (double-sided, 2 to 80,000 boards, 0201, BGA 0.3 mm). You order bare boards from 5 pieces; you can have 2 of them assembled. The factory is fast: 2-layer boards in 24 hours, and assembly usually within 24 to 48 hours after the boards are ready. The bare board always comes from JLCPCB itself. Two things to know before you order: JLCPCB only assembles what is in stock at the moment you order, and if a part sells out afterwards, it is not placed and you get a refund. And once PCB production has started, you can no longer change the order; if you want to change a file, you cancel, get a refund and pay for a recalculated order.

PCBWay (Hangzhou, production in Shenzhen) is the comparable option for a BOM that does not fit LCSC: turnkey or your own kits from 5 boards, parts from its own stock plus Digi-Key, Mouser, Arrow and Avnet without markup, first-article photos on which you approve the orientation, BGA down to 0.3 mm with X-ray inspection and, just like JLCPCB, only its own bare boards. An engineer reviews every quote. Assembly takes "3 to 5 days" once all parts and boards are in; PCB production and parts sourcing come on top of that.

Pros: the lowest bare-board price on the market; instant price; fast factory.

Cons: parts outside LCSC cost time and money; out-of-stock parts are skipped; every revision is a new order with setup, stencil and part fees again; your design files go to the factory in Shenzhen and an NDA is not standard.

Choose this if: you can build your BOM largely from LCSC stock, the design is a one-off or final, and two weeks of waiting is not a problem.

Route 5: DeltaProto, quick-turn assembly for the phase where the design is still changing

We assemble prototypes and small series only, in two labs in the Netherlands, Amsterdam and Enschede, for the phase in which a design is built, tested and changed. Different boards every day, always in small numbers; our machines, our software and our way of working are set up for that, not for series production. You can read more on our page about prototype PCB assembly.

How it works: upload Gerber and drill, BOM and centroid the way your CAD package exports them, and the calculator gives a price within seconds that is about 95% accurate. The quote follows within a few hours. If anything is unclear, an engineer asks you before you order. The minimum order is 2 boards, with no surcharge for small quantities. Lead time is from 5 working days, from order to dispatch of the first sample, PCB and parts included.

Parts: we buy from Digi-Key, Mouser, Farnell, LCSC, TME, RS, Arrow, Verical and Würth Elektronik, only what is in stock, and we check live stock at each supplier before we order. Without markup: you pay what the supplier charges us. You can supply your own parts, and if a scarce part is still on an old board, we desolder it free of charge. For the bare PCB you have the choice too. Supply it yourself, or let us buy it per board from one of the manufacturers we work with in Europe and Asia; the PCB often determines most of the turnaround time. Filled vias for a BGA? We order them from the factory, or we fill them ourselves with a modified stencil for the first sample, so it still ships within a few days. And if you designed for the pool stackup of Eurocircuits or Aisler, you are not tied to their assembly service: we buy the board there, or you order it yourself and send it to us, and we assemble it. Everything you send us is confidential; a mutual NDA is ready to download.

The difference is in what happens after the first board. We build one sample first, not the whole order: the First Proto, with a high-resolution photo of the assembled board. More than 90% of our customers then change something. You put the changes on the List of Change and we build the next sample from it; three samples per order are included. If it is only a parts change and the replacements are in stock, the new sample can ship within 24 hours; a completely new design takes at least 5 working days.

Pros: price within seconds, first sample from 5 working days, parts at distributor prices, an engineer who thinks along with you, iterations within one order.

Cons: not the cheapest for a one-off hobby board; not a series supplier. From a few hundred boards an EMS is the better choice, and we will tell you so; for those quantities we give a price estimate from our series partners.

Choose this if: the design is still going to change, the parts come from the distributors you already use, and a week of waiting costs more than the boards themselves.

What a prototype really costs: the board, the order and the week

How much cheaper is a Chinese board really? On 7 October 2026 we filled in the public calculators ourselves, without logging in, for one reference board: 4 layers, 100 x 80 mm, 1.6 mm FR4, ENIG, 10 and 2 pieces, standard lead time, excluding VAT where the calculator said so.

The bare board: China wins by a wide margin.

In China a bare board costs a fraction of the European price; there is no arguing with that. If bare boards are all you need, that is a strong argument. For an assembled prototype, however, the board is only one cost item.

DeltaProto buys your bare boards wherever you want them made, or you supply them yourself. The PCB part of a DeltaProto price follows the market in the table above; what we sell is the assembly, the parts handling and the iterations.

The order. JLCPCB's price page (updated September 2026) lists a setup fee of $8.18 and a stencil at $1.53 for Economic. For Standard it is $25.56 or $51.12 setup and $8.21 or $16.42 for the stencil, single- or double-sided. On top of that, every extended part costs $3.07 (Economic) or $1.53 (Standard) per unique part number, per order: 15 extended parts add about $46. You pay these costs again with every revision. Eurocircuits and Beta Layout do not charge the stencil separately; at an EMS it is an NRE line on the quote. At DeltaProto the price in the calculator is the price you pay.

The week. The most expensive cost item appears on no checkout page: the week your team spends waiting. A startup spending €100,000 a month loses about €25,000 per week of waiting, per iteration. Saving a few hundred euros on the boards does not change that. More on this in what a week of waiting for a protoPCBA costs and Total Cost of Development.

So calculate the cost per iteration, not the price per board. And that brings us to what almost nobody compares.

What nobody compares: the second sample

Almost every comparison on the internet is about the first order. Almost nobody looks at what happens when the first board arrives and you have to change something, and if our customers are representative, that happens in more than nine out of ten cases.

• Dutch EMS. A change is an engineering change order: back to the sales engineer, a new quote, possibly a new stencil and new NRE costs, and a new slot in the planning. Thorough, but slow.
• Eurocircuits. Your project keeps the revisions and the next version is a new order from 1 piece, again with a stencil. The model is designed to make a second round unnecessary, not to make it cheap.
• Aisler. The order is fixed at checkout; later changes go through the project manager and may be charged, and a changed design is a new order. Because there is no fixed order fee, a new round is relatively cheap. Leftover parts come back to you with the boards; if you send them in again, that counts as supplying your own parts.
• JLCPCB. A new order, with setup fees, a stencil and the extended-part fees for every unique part again. Globally sourced parts stay in your private library for the next order; that is the only way to avoid waiting another 9 to 20 days for sourcing.
• PCBWay. A new quote via the engineer, with your own parts from the previous production run as far as you still have them.
• DeltaProto. With us, the order is built around the second sample. Your changes are on the List of Change and we build the next sample from it, within the same order, with the parts already on the shelf. Three samples are included, and more if needed. If you are almost there, send the sample back with our free return voucher; we then modify it instead of building it again. In our lab sample 2 is not a failure, but the normal course of events.

Which route for which phase

• A one-off hobby board, parts from the LCSC library, no hurry. JLCPCB Economic: five bare boards, two of them assembled. Check the orientation of the parts in the preview.
• A student team with a fixed race date. Aisler if the BOM is standard and someone on the team is handy with KiCad. DeltaProto if the design will still change before the deadline and the deadline will not move. The Delft Solar Team had new versions of its boards made with us at the last moment, and won.
• A startup prototype with parts from Digi-Key and Mouser, design still in development. Not JLCPCB, unless you adapt your design to LCSC stock. Eurocircuits if right first time in a certified process matters most. Aisler for a cheap new version. DeltaProto if the second and third samples need to come quickly and you want to be able to call an engineer.
• 20 to 200 boards, field test or pilot run. The expensive middle ground: too few for an EMS to recover its setup costs, too many for a web shop set up for 1 to 50 pieces. This is what we are set up for.
• A few hundred identical boards or more. An EMS: a regional EMS for medium-sized series, Neways or VDL TBP if you need system integration and certified processes. We will tell you that honestly.

In short

Almost every one of these routes is capable of delivering a good PCBA. The real difference is in what happens when a part is out of stock and when the design changes. Choose the route that fits the phase you are in, and switch when that phase changes. If your design is still evolving, upload your files and see within seconds what your prototype costs. No account, no sales call.