This has been debated several times.

Spondoolies ("only") had around $4m in funding (before sp10).

Parts for sp30 production batches need to be ordered around 2 months in advance, chips more like 3.

Parts and manufacturing costs alone are around $2m per month (assuming 1000 units produced), and chip NRE is typically around $3-5M, which also needs to be gotten back.

Spondoolies already fronted the NRE, and cannot produce units without the parts (which they in turn had to pre-pay and pre-order).


Unless you can produce money from thin air, there really is no other option to have customers pre-pay some orders.

Later batches might be available with less pre-payment required, since spondoolies should soon recover the NRE and only needs to pay for parts in production.


Pre-payment or made-to-order also allows them to estimate their production volume much more accurately.