Did you read the rest of my post? Many of the earlier posts doing budget calculations were assuming they were looking at making a profit on these early sales so assuming they are willing to supply them at cost just to get the money in/the units out there then they have $150 for component cost/development with the profit (if any) to come from future retail sales.
Martin.
I disagree they have $150 for component costs. Not even close.
Firstly, they sold a bunch at $125, but let's go with the $150 number and let's assume that is the sum total of all expenses to make a run of 1,500 imagers.
Since that price includes all costs, it would include packaging, assembly, shipping costs, printed materials, accessories, labor, etc. Those costs will be much higher than I bet most people assume.
The other big one is the NRE costs - NRE for PCB's is small, but NRE for injection molded housings is huge. Add in the one-off parts they've bought, prototype PCB's, software and hardware and such, and they must have spent at least a few tens of thousands of $$$'s on this - assuming none of them are taking a salary. Since they needed funding to make this idea a reality, and since all those NRE and R&D costs must be paid up front, it must be subtracted from the amount they raised. Even if they were miraculously able to spend only $30k on all of that... that leaves them $250k to make 1850 imagers. Considering all the other costs I mentioned, that would be a max of maybe $100 in parts per unit.
Add up the cost of the parts we already know about - and it leaves them virtually nothing to spend on the most important parts - the imager and the lens.
The reality is more likely that R&D and NRE costs on such a device would cost $50k-100k easily and all their other costs will easily add 20% to the parts price. Which means they have $75 or so to spend on parts, in total.
Coming at it from the other side - as a small independent who approaches Best Buy and such to sell their product, they will be paying for shelf space, marketing, returns, shipping, promotions/sales, samples, etc. Then there is the cost of sales and much more. If they want to retail it at $400, it better have $40 or less in parts in it, or they're screwed.
Here's a decent intro to all the costs associated with distribution:
https://www.nuvonium.com/blog/view/how-to-price-your-product-for-retail-distributor-and-direct-to-consumer-salAnd we never even considered testing/approvals (FCC, and whatever equivalents around the world).