Please don't take wrong way. Please don't cheap on your clients. You need to set yourself aside from the competition. A business prof at UND taught me:
Never compete based on price, because there will always be someone willing to go out of business quicker than you.
Not to say you shouldn't be thinking about price, but if you use price to set yourself apart, you will damage yourself and your brand. You will attract all sorts of garbage, including people who won't appreciate you being the cheapest and expect cheaper/faster/better. I mean, look at how well someone in our group does with pricing themselves at crazy point. Means it is doable.
It's like the joke of "Cheap, speed, or quality; Pick two. You will never get all three." - I think if you pick cheap, you will ALWAYS lose quality and speed.
Can you get away charging double? Sure. Half the customers, double the price. You make the same and have a bunch more free time, or you have more time to find more clients to pay more.
Granted, this does only work if you have a market to do it with.
THAT SAID, and back to topic; Obviously the components from Kingdian are coming out of some supplier for parts, but they too have done SOMETHING to come to the lower price. Are they using old controllers? Are they using cheap storage OR cast-off storage that other manufacturers won't accept the quality/rated MTBF? If you read reviews, lots of good, but start looking between lines. Lot of more knowledgable people have indicated they do take shortcuts for that lower cost, and other reviews do show premature death.
Do you want that for your client? Quickest way to make sure a customer doesn't come back in your door; Lose their data from choosing a bad drive. And I will tell you, other techs will bash the HECK out of you TO the customer for using Kingdian.
HP was AWFUL for zero-life drives for a while, and they did hurt their brand for it. They also used those awful Seagate drives with the label (Momentus Slim?) - I have 0 respect for HP to this day, even though I know they've started reversing. Big companies will save themselves $0.10 a unit by going with garbage drives, just to save themselves $100k per million units.
Set yourself aside from the competition. Be the one everyone goes to when others goof up. Don't brag. Don't put others down. But don't be afraid to showcase what you do. You'd be surprised at how much advertising your trusted brands will get you too.
Want cheaper? Pick a generation older SSD. MX500s are really not much more than Kingdians, and will save you sanity. Does saving a customer $5 make up for 2-10% of those same clients coming back in your door, blasting you for picking garbage for their system? And if $5 will close a deal for you, if someone is that tight of a penny pincher, is that a customer you want? (Answer: No)
