As per the subject:
Thought it might be of interest to y’all who need custom PCBs every now and them (@wolfgirl42, @thefreeman and possibly @ToyKeeper and @YBF650 too).
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Looks useful for getting drivers made. Kind of a shame it doesn’t mention MCPCBs, which are possibly the most important kind of board for us enthusiasts.
I’ve used Oshpark, Ailser and JLCPCB.
Oshpark is expensive per area but has no fixed cost (free shipping too), thus single cell driver PCBs are cheap because of their small sizes.
As the author of the article said the quality is very good, although I did receive one time a set of deffective boards, the router milled a notch right into a functional area. Another time the mask had a large offset, I selected the better one for assembly and discarded the rest.
Their flex offer is the cheapest for small boards.
Their support is very good and responsive for after sale and questions, they either refunded or replaced defective the PCB and lost packages.
High resolution silkscreen.
They don’t have a lot of PCB options.
Long shipping delay for EU and fairly long manufacturing with the non rush option (which isn’t that quick either)
Ailser used to have a 6€ fixed fee but they increased it to 12€ earlier this year, they lost me there, for small boards it’s not worth it anymore and you can’t panelize boards.
The ENIG boards are good, the silkscreen was often offset though and lower resolution than Oshpark. I ordered only 2 times with HASL, one time some pads weren’t tinned and were highly oxidised.
The milling tolerance has always been very good, the best of the three.
The support was good when I used it.
They want 0.2mm anular which is unusually large, 0.3mm drill vias end up 0.7mm which is quite large, thankfully 4layer boards allow 0.2mm drill vias.
Very few PCB options.
Very good stainlesss 0.1mm stencils, and the cheapest (but only for EU with free shipping), I don’t often use stencils but I always get them from Aisler.
Similar manufacturing times to Oshpark, but quicker shipping in EU.
JLCPCB is the cheapest by a lot except for tiny boards (oshpark), with a lot of options, some with relatively high cost but still many at base price or low cost, many PCB thicknesses, anyway that’s usual for Chinese board houses.
Base finish is HASL.
Silk is comparable to Aisler, 0.6mm is barely readable
PCB quality has been good, no major defects, one time I got a thin mask line on a thermal pad of a IC, quite a weird missprint, but the boards were usable.
The base milling tolerance isn’t great.
For a long time they had ENIG 6-8 layer Vias in pads for 2$, insane promo which I used a lot, now it’s a one time free promo.
Support for technical questions is ok, some language barrier issues, I haven’t used after sales support yet.
Several shipping options, I’ve only used the cheapest, takes 1-3weeks to EU, with manufacturing the total time ends up similar to Aisler, quicker than Oshpark.
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Thanks for the detailed comments on your experience with them, @thefreeman!
As per @YBF650 post, does any of them do MCPCBs?
JLC does, aluminium (cheap) and DTP copper, the latter probably being the cheapest service on the market with a 46$ base cost.
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I don’t have direct experience with any other than JLCPCB, but I did look around to see who could do some MCPCBs for the SFT40 and B35AM D4Sv2 boards.
JLC can do 1.6mm aluminum and 1oz copper (1.6mm thick core). It also was the cheapest option. (sub-$100 for copper and sub-$20 for like 50 boards in aluminum). The copper boards were decent quality, though they needed a bit of touchup with sandpaper to get rid of some burrs on the bottom holes.
PCBway also can do MCPCBs in copper and aluminum, with the copper MCPCBs going up to much thicker traces and cores, but they are also much more expensive (>$300) and has a much bigger minimum order.
I haven’t looked into other manufacturers for MCPCBs though.
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I’d love to get ahold of a 5050 quad board. If you, or anyone else, commissions some and finds yourself with too many, I’d gladly pay a premium for a couple.
It depends what optic you want to use it with. Jackson (jlhawaii808) should have some available for the D4Sv2 optic (Ledil Angie) but they’re kind of expensive. Send me a PM and I’ll add you to the list for whenever I order boards.
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Ordered many times from JLCPCB all good. Now 1st time ordered with assembly … waiting impatiently. In few weeks we will see 
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Just learned that PCBWay offers buried passives. There’s a large cost to that…but seems that it’s fixed or almost fixed.
Maybe it would be useful for the tightest drivers…?
First time I hear of that. Here’s the link for everyone interested: Technology of High Speed Buried Resistance PCB Board - Technology - PCBway
I wonder how totally irreparable is any circuit using that…