honestly its the lowest thats technically possible to sell. Good components just cost that much. After vat our margin is around 35 (pre-retail) which is lower than most vendors, meaning if we sell to retail we wont make a cent. it just costs that much to get tested, working components with decent manufacturing. If you find good specs cheaper trust me they used B-grade components that will break down sooner or later.

If your margin is 35, you are going to go out of business unless you can find a way to create additional revenue streams. Your customer lifetime value is likely going to be less than 100, if that. If you sell a million customers (which I think is a very difficult number to reach with this semi-niche phone,) you are going to still be struggling over the long term. A 10% margin is not enough. One misstep wipes out your margin. Also with each phone you sell, there will be additional support and warranty expenses that likely haven’t been added to your unit cost.

If wish you good luck of course, but just be aware that building the phone — that’s the easy part: sales, support and the software — that’s a lot of “stuff” that costs significant money — an expense that continues past the shipping of the actual device.

There are two ways to win in the phone business- market share/volume or profit per unit. You are also competing against established manufacturers with essentially a barely-deferentiated product and, given your margins, customer acquisition is going to be very, very tough.

If it were me, I’d work on a completely new OS — I’d build an entirely new thing rather than just something marginally different — and ostensibly, marginally better. A generic phone with a different flavor of Android — do you really want to go up against the Samsung’s and Huawei’s?

No disrespect intended — I hope you succeed!

I both disagree with your assertion, and find it sad that michaelmior is being downvoted.

My wife uses the moto G Play. <150USD for a perfectly functional phone, and frankly I'd even call it "far from minimal," (it has features that many flagships unfortunately don't support any more, e.g. sd cards, removable batteries, and headphone jacks) and for years have looked for an even more commodity platform myself since I have no need for apps or beefy hardware. (GPS, text, html only browser, email, with barely enough horsepower to run the above + a beefy battery would be the pipedream, and sounds _not too far_ from the brick phones I used ~20 years back)

As I told a coworker when I saw this post: Either our expectations of "minimal" or the english language has gotten entirely out of wack, because 350 pounds for a smartphone is so far from minimal as to be laughable. Maybe a "minimal flagship" (and this is where I'm inclined to think the gap between your view on this and mine is, where you said 'if you find good specs cheaper'. Perhaps my view on "good" is a much lower bar, but I'm perfectly happy with my 60$, 5 year old Lumia, and find it to be _far more minimal_, while directly challenging your "break down sooner or later" assertion; I've had droid flagships that didn't last as long.)

I guess you're right we have complete perception of minimal. I wrote somewhere else our aim was to be exactly between Flagship smartphones and complete detox options like litephone or an old refurbished nokia, I think you're more looking for those options.

You're probably right re: how we're looking at minimalism, and if that range was your aim, your price point seems much more fair.

The mental dissonance came for me simply from my perception of the word "minimal;" I have a wonderful moment of "Oh man someone's finally making the phone I wish I could buy" whenever I see a thread with this or similar verbiage, then the sad realization that I'm apparently too far to the 'throw out everything but your matress' side of minimal.

I was simply surprised to have not seen other feedback along this vein, and moreso when the other commenter was going grey for advocating what I thought were some good examples of models in that range.

Anyway, I'd want to cap this with a friendly "good luck"; Don't take my jaded disappointment as anything more than the whinging of someone tilting at the windmills of eternally larger and more expensive phones. (Although if you DO ever get the chance to advocate for a truly bare-bones-minimalism in a future product, here's a hearty nudge nudge from this curmudgeon.)

thanks a lot and sure I def. got your point and I think our target is different than you (you should checkout the other products like lite & punkt). The tag - minimalist was written by the OP and not us, we barely use (and stopping more often) the term minimalism esp. that closely to our brand / product. our html title is "back to the root" and our slogan is "people first" (printed on the packaging & on the back of the phone) as it better describes our mission.

I've had good smart phones (e.g. Moto G) in the recent past for less than half that price. Maybe I'm just not in the target market.

It will involve minimalist features, like minimalist horsepower and screen size.

Quite minimal phone-only phones do exist, like Punkt MP 101, or more conventional phones, especially kids-oriented.

I had a Moto F3 for a while and the battery lasted forever but the lack of features was sort of brutal: the screen was e-ink but only an 8-segment display one so it was impossible to see things like unicode characters and even distinguish between capital and regular case sometimes. This seems a nice balance between that and a smartphone.

Edit: I got my Moto F3 for 20 bucks, the Punkt is 229. Nope.

For an unconventional phone (=limited target group, risky) + the insurance + the work going into the app integration the price does not seem to be high at all, to me.

It's true that in this case the insurance is a nice benefit. But as a consumer, I don't really care about the fact that the venture is risky. I'm getting a phone with fewer features, but not really paying less.