Order of Magnitude Cost to Ship an iOS Bluetooth Accessory

Question

This is a request for guidance regarding Bluetooth accessory development for iOS devices.

Publicly available documentation/discussion seems limited; I assume this is due to the MFI NDA.

And I didn't find the quantity/variety of iOS Bluetooth accessories I'd expect if accessory development was as accessible as iOS development in general. So I assume there is substantial overhead in shipping MFI accesories.

My question is: what was the magnitude of overhead to get your first MFI accesory prototype shipped (MFI fees, legal, dev hardware, etc)? I'm looking for the accessory-specific component of costs, so above and beyond the normal iOS software development work.

$1,000?
$10,000?
$100,000?

If NDAs preclude answering, perhaps you could offer guidance about where I can ask general questions like this (DTS ticket?) prior to incurring MFI enrollment expenses.

Answer 1

Building iPhone OS Accessories by Ken Maskrey is a good read and probably the most detailed account of the MFi program you'll get outside of the NDA. It answers most of the questions you've posed.