Did the price just increase?

[bosoxx091]

I swear the base Crack was around $300 or so but just went to order and it's basically $400 with shipping and $500+ with the speedball. Yikes should've ordered sooner

[Paul Birkeland]

Yes, inflation in the last year has been substantial.

[Doc B.]

Yes, wood and metal prices have gone up in a crazy hurry. So our cost for wood bases, chassis panels and transformers has gone up dramatically in the past few weeks. We have been forced to raise prices around 10-12%. The price for the basic Crack kit went up from $315 to $349. That is the first price increase in quite some time. Supply has also been an issue and may get worse before it gets better.

On the bright side, we have been hammering like hell to get kits out and got really caught up for the moment. So ordering now would mean a pretty short lead time. I think we only have five Crack kits in the packing queue as of this afternoon. That is unheard of, the backlog is pretty constantly around 20-30.

[Paul Birkeland]

I remember buying these for less than $20 about a year ago...

[Mucker]

IMO, the Crack + SB is still a bargain compared a whole slew of cold and lifeless SS amps (and other manufacturer's tube amps with major QC issues.). It's amazing the prices did not escalate more over the past few years. With runaway inflation and atrocious fiscal management in vogue, probably best to buy your Bottlehead stuffs now before it really gets out of control. My opinion only ....

[Doc B.]

It's amazing the prices did not escalate more over the past few years.

Yup. 2020 was a weird year and inflation was considerably lower than it had been in previous years. So now we are facing the bounce back to rates like we saw two or three years ago. Instead of raising prices back then we would put things on sale at prices that have become unworkable for us as costs rose - "we lose a quarter on every donut we sell, but we make up for it in volume." When our shipping manager moved on we took that job over to trim our labor costs. As our rent rose to unreasonable levels for our operation we moved to a space that cost half as much for nearly the same amount of space in order to cut our fixed costs. But we can't do the same thing with our inventory costs.

We are now running about as lean and mean as we ever have in 25 years. Prices are kept as low as possible and the best bet will be to assume the current price will be lower than the future price. The ever increasing demand for materials like wood and metal is not going to drop unless the population drops. The might happen after all of us boomers die off, but that's gonna be 30 years or more coming.

[oguinn]

I remember buying these for less than $20 about a year ago...

God tell me about it. I need about four sheets of plywood to crate up and move my Jagers (and another full sheet for all the amps I have laying around). It might just be cheaper to start over with fresh kits!

[Doc B.]

Depending upon how animalistic your movers are you might be able to palletize them with strapping and lots of padding.

[oguinn]

We anticipate moving twice (once now to a rental and once in a year to a house we buy… hopefully the housing market cools off), so I think the effort to build crates will be worth it.