>I know you're having trouble due to the costs associated with low volume, but to an ordinary purchaser your price looks like a rip-off. Yup, being a hardware

>I know you're having trouble due to the costs associated with low volume, but to an ordinary purchaser your price looks like a rip-off. Yup, being a hardware engineer makes you appreciate just how cheap some things are. Bear in mind that our motivation to develop our instrument was shock at how much the incumbents were charging! I think getting to O($500) for a quality instrument without high volume would be fairly doable with some clever design work. Getting to O($100) yes, if you could make the entire optical bench as a MEMS product and you have scale on your side (this has been done partially by SCiO). A big limiting factor is that there aren't many perceived use-cases beyond "science". The big consumer one that everyone touts is food inspection, but outside a few very specific uses, it's a gimmick to most people. Maybe for avocado ripeness... It's also not ready for primetime yet. The real markets are places like astronomy where people don't hesitate spending thousands on glass and silicon. Brewing is another. You want hobbies which are taken up by data nerds. The other problem is that spectrometers are overkill for a lot of stuff. Colour measurement for instance - (calibrated) colorimiter ICs are incredibly cheap. For applications where you need the resolution you either need an experienced user or software to automatically interpret the results. There are some other off the shelf solutions: Hamamatsu make a low resolution spectrometer that's good enough for general demonstration - costs a few hundred[1]. AMS make an 18-channel "spectral" sensor which costs $10 (ish?). There have been a few Kickstarters which are trying to address this e.g. the SCiO [2]. That's about the closest we've got so far to a mass market spectrometer and it costs $299. The problem as you say is: how many schools can afford even $100 on a device which may only get used once or twice a year? Holding a transmission grating up to your eye will solve maybe 90% of the needs of most teachers. It's enough to show different line emission from a bunch of lamps. The public labs spectrometer would do for the other %10. [1]https://www.consumerphysics.com/scio-for-consumers/ https://www.consumerphysics.com/scio-for-consumers/ [2]https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/products/c12880ma-micro-spectrometer https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/hamamatsu-photonics/prod...