Low volume hardware pricing always look infuriatingly high, but they also start looking hopelessly low once you've dipped toes into it and tried multiplying you

Low volume hardware pricing always look infuriatingly high, but they also start looking hopelessly low once you've dipped toes into it and tried multiplying your spent development man-hours with McDonalds wages or tolerable unit price by expected sales volume. I've never heard of Blue Robotics, but I doubt that $175 product ships 1k units/year, and even if they did, that's $170k revenue, or 2x entry level engineers salary worth of raw recovered cash before factoring in any expenditure whatsoever, let alone taxes and HR. It probably hardly feeds one, and that's based on an optimistic hypotheticals that they ship a thousand of that product every year. Large scale multinational corporations ship in orders of million units. That makes it way easier to amortize non-recurring engineering and ship small products virtually at cost.