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Most pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies are conceived in environments where electricity, purified water, skilled operators, calibrated instruments, and validated supply chains are treated as stable background conditions. These assumptions shape equipment selection, process control, formulation strategy, packaging design, and quality assurance architecture. When such technologies are transferred unchanged into low-resource environments, the hidden dependence on high-resource infrastructure becomes visible. The central problem is not simply scarcity but design-context mismatch. Technologies that require continuous utilities, specialist maintenance, narrow environmental control, or complex analytical confirmation may produce avoidable quality deviations, production interruptions, and inequitable access. Low-resource manufacturing therefore requires a design logic that begins with constraints rather than adapting to them after failure. The proposed approach translates infrastructure, workforce, supply-chain, and quality-system constraints into design requirements. It argues for simple, robust, modular, maintainable, and environmentally tolerant technologies that preserve critical quality attributes without requiring fragile operating conditions. Three tables support the framework by cataloguing constraints, technology principles, and decision logic. Frugal pharmaceutical design is not a lowering of standards. It is a disciplined method for building quality into technologies that must function where conventional manufacturing assumptions do not hold. Its wider adoption requires pharmaceutical scientists, regulators, global health practitioners, and local manufacturers to treat low-resource design as a legitimate and necessary branch of pharmaceutical technology.