Just as he was about to make his first profit and launch a new product for retail sales, his company could no longer maintain the status quo. He said that although Arduboy sales have exceeded $1 million, with a large portion coming from recent growth in 2023 and 2024, Trump's new 104% tariffs on China will be the beginning of the end.
"I just love making boards and helping people learn to code games. It's just too much," he said.
Bates admitted that he had always wanted to discontinue the Arduboy, saying he couldn't meet Trump's stated goal of restarting U.S. manufacturing: "Not a single Arduboy manufacturer in the U.S. would respond to emails, let alone give a good price. I could do it myself and make about $10 an hour, but parts would still be prohibitively expensive." Instead, he said, his options were to raise prices significantly, find a way around tariffs, or shut down Arduboy altogether.
"The fact that Arduboy has survived is simply a miracle of global trade. One individual, producing and distributing an international product, with profit margins that are simply not feasible in a large company. I don't need an 80 percent markup to survive," he said, adding that his actual profit margins range from 30 to 50 percent.
Trump's U.S. tariffs will completely wipe out those profits, and he said China's retaliatory tariffs will also hurt, as they will impose a 34% tariff on the U.S.-made processor in the Arduboy, which Bates said is the most expensive component in the system.
While he hopes that some larger organization will acquire Arduboy and take over the baton, he admits that this is not realistic in the current economic climate. He has declared Arduboy "dead" on LinkedIn and the Arduboy Forum. He started looking for a new job again.
But he said Arduboy has not been completely discontinued. He wants to launch a final Kickstarter campaign to launch a USB-C version of the Arduboy and "add more features like a real-time clock, IR blaster, and cable support," assuming he can figure out how to ship it at a price that users will accept. He said that he already felt that the $99 ArduboyFX Special Edition was overpriced, and he did not want the new version to cost as much as $200, nor did he want buyers to bear customs duties if they chose dropshipping.
"The only realistic solution is to store inventory somewhere without Chinese import taxes and ship everything directly. I went to the factory last year to discuss this issue and they said all customers were facing the same situation, so they said there would be a solution. But there is no concrete implementation yet," he said.
The packages may be held at U.S. Customs for some time because Trump has also eliminated the minimum duty exemption that allowed low-value packages to enter the country duty-free. "This will affect all platforms from Shein to Temu to AliExpress, and to be honest, it will cause chaos. U.S. Customs is not ready to handle such a large volume of packages," he said.
Bates said Trump's trade war "is an absolute disaster for anyone who doesn't have the ability to radically restructure, and I think that's the point," he added.