There is a lot of things that come into play when you are looking at small-scale manufacturing versus a DIY project one-of for your own personal use. On one hand, when you purchase in quantity, you can lower the cost per unit. On the other, that means cash outlays that are significantly higher.
Some things are relatively inexpensive ... setting up a website, securing domain names, organizing your twitter and social media accounts, and product development and documentation when you do a lot of the grunt work yourself, at slave wages (in other words $0).
Other things are quite costly ... in order to get good pricing, you have to order parts in quantity. Things that would be un-necessary for a one-of, like product packaging so that whatever you are offering can arrive across continents in one piece need to be sorted out, and you can't usually buy just one cardboard box, you typically need to buy at least 50, sometimes more.
The net result is your upfront costs are quite significant. For my transformers, my minimum order is in the four figures, for example. PCBs at low quantity are quite expensive per-board; again the real price break doesn't normally happen there until you are ordering perhaps 50 copies. And so on.
Had I just wanted to make one for myself, I could have been all-in for a cost that is actually near my target retail price, boxed, shipped, and finished to a level at least consistent with the competition. A bare box with some connector and control indicators made on a label printer would have been fine; for a retail product that just won't do. As it is, my initial outlay is going to be equivalent to many DIY copies, even though I am getting some cost savings on a per-unit basis by buying parts in quantity.
I'm not complaining, just laying out some factors that, in the end, make up whatever profit per unit that can be reasonably made justifiable.
There is a standard "rule of thumb" in electronics manufacturing that the raw parts count will equal 20% of the retail price. My target price is nowhere near that ... I don't think I will even make a 50% ratio. Part of that is the direct-to-consumer marketing model, which shaves 30 to 40% (typically) off the final retail price. Without revealing exactly what the industry expects for a retail margin on this type of product, except to say that it's amongst the lower range, versus, say, accessories, there are additional costs that reduce the savings to the consumer somewhat. Put another way, I'm doing things that the retailer would otherwise take care of, and some of them cost money.
Still, in keeping with my philosophy in Audio that goes back to my days as a retailer, many years ago, I am a "value" kind of guy. People who read some of my posts might be a little surprised to read that ... but value does not necessarily equal "lowest price". It rarely does, actually. But in Audio there are certain thresholds where, once you spend X dollars, you get tremendous performance gains versus saving a few dollars. I like stuff that sits at those thresholds.
A large part of value, in my opinion, is quality. You can't have a high value product if the quality is not also high, especially as viewed versus the retail price and versus the competition.
So, I am hoping that when this eventually becomes available, people will be happy with the quality and the price paid, with "quality" also extending to the sonics, of course; that combination in my opinion equals good value.