Hello & Question about SMALL boards

First off, hello! I’m new here. I just placed my first Fusion PCB order last week!

My question is one of clarification really. I’ve never dealt with panlization before, as the fab I’ve used before hand did panelization for me. For last weeks order, panlization was easy because the board was roughly 5x10 cm. I just put two together on a 10x10 panel, and all was well.

But here’s my challenge. The board above was an oddity for me. Usually, I’m getting very very small boards made, on the order of ~8mm x 12mm. So I’m confused as to whether the rule that “There should be no more than 5 sub-boards to fit the size” means “no more than 5 different sub-boards” or “no more than 5 repetitions of any sub-board”.

It sort of seems counter-intuitive to me that they would care how many times I repeat a board on my own panel. But not being familiar with the fab side of things, this may be intuitive after all. Regardless, the challenge I would run into is that 5 of my boards would occupy under 480 square mm, and thus I’d be wasting 2020 square mm of board space if I was artificially limited to only reproducing a design 5 times.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

hi there,
sorry, we offer planelizing is for customer to reduce cost, but this is the rule of factory, we can’t change it.
regards,
dwin

I need answer for this too.

“Your Gerber file must include only one design”, what does that mean?
By design, do you mean multiple gerber files, as of copies of the same board? Or multiple repetitive circuits on one board?

Or to put it simply, is it allowed to have same circuit repeated on one board?