"Cool" What determines wages is the level of skill required for the job. And if you're some punk keyboard warrior that doesn't have any skills of value, then I

"Cool" What determines wages is the level of skill required for the job. And if you're some punk keyboard warrior that doesn't have any skills of value, then I'm sorry. It must really suck not to be valued. But for the skilled people involved in making products like this, that skill has value. So those people are able to look at what they've done, and say "I believe my work is worth $X". They then do the above math to work out how much they need to charge per unit, to get that level of compensation. People get entire degrees in this for some reason, but it's really not that hard: * You make more money per unit if you charge more * You sell more units if you charge less * There is a theoretical max point on the curve of units sold * price People who have the skills to develop their own products try to guess the maximum on that curve, and if it is less than what they want to live on they have to adjust their goals or kill the product. The approach you're proposing is to simply charge a small margin on raw materials and manufacturing time is predicated on the time of the person/people designing the product being worthless. I don't think that, not about me, not about the developers working on playdate, not about developers working on other products. Even products I don't like. Yes there will always be minimum-wage/mindless labour. Software and hardware design aren't that.