Monthly membership · Cancel any time

Unfiltered China Insider

One deep teardown every month, with real numbers from real factories. Price and lead-time signals when they move. And a standing offer: send me your quotation and an engineer will read it back to you.

Cancel from your receipt, any month, no email and no exit survey.

What members get

One industry teardown per month

A single product or industry, taken apart: how it is actually made, where the margin sits, what a fair price looks like at 100 / 1,000 / 10,000 units, and which step in the process is where quality quietly dies. Written from work I have personally done, not from other people's articles.

Price and lead-time signals

When lithium, copper, resin or freight rates move, you hear it here first with the direction and rough magnitude — so you know whether to lock a price or wait, and whether a supplier's "raw material increase" is real.

Member Q&A — send your quote

The part members use most. Send a quotation, a spec sheet or a supplier message and get an engineer's read on it: where the padding is, what is missing, what to push back on. Answered in a monthly round-up so everyone benefits from the pattern.

Supplier red-flag reports

When a supplier or a practice turns out to be a problem — name, pattern and evidence — members see it. Shared as it surfaces, not on a schedule.

The archive

Every past teardown, every Q&A round-up, all checklists and templates. Your membership is a library, not a newsletter.

Nothing else

No upsells, no courses, no "mastermind". If a month goes out with something you cannot use, tell me and I will fix it or refund that month.

Who it is for

If you place more than two orders a year from China, this pays for itself on one of them.

The arithmetic is unglamorous. $15 a month is $180 a year. A single avoided mistake — a tooling fee that was never real, a shipment that misses spec, a 30-day delay that costs you a selling season — is usually worth more than the whole year.

But the honest version: if you are placing one exploratory order and nothing more, buy the Playbook instead. A subscription only makes sense when you are going to keep buying.

How it works

  1. Subscribe — card, PayPal or Apple Pay
  2. Get access to the full archive immediately
  3. One teardown lands each month, signals as they happen
  4. Send questions any time; they are answered in the monthly round-up
  5. Cancel from your receipt whenever you want

What I will not do

  • Place orders or hold money on your behalf
  • Act as your agent or take a cut of your purchases
  • Guarantee any factory

That independence is the whole point. I am paid to be right, not to close your order.