well professionally (and its likely a lot more than that), but in the hobby market there are a lot of low end devices with free or zero cost tools. The iCE40 b

well professionally (and its likely a lot more than that), but in the hobby market there are a lot of low end devices with free or zero cost tools. The iCE40 boards are sub $20 (iCESugar nano) and have an open source toolchains. And things like the ECP5(G) boards are large enough to host full RISC-V/etc environments for less than $50. So, yah, FPGA's can get outrageously expensive, but there are a lot of low end devices with a lot of capabilities (those ECP5's have highspeed serdes, which can act as PCIe cards for example).