FCDEV3B price justification

[Mychaela Falconia]

Das Signal wrote:

> Thank you for the clarification. It is worth noting as well that
> there are important sunken costs that were necessary, in particular
> the expensive R&S calibration unit (which had to be fixed, too)
> and the rework job on the gerber that was essential as well.

Regarding those sunk cost, I just did a little accounting to figure
out just how much they add up to.  I've gone through my accounting
logs going back to 2013 (the beginning of FreeCalypso), grepped for
the E-MOBL accounting code ("engineering, mobile"), filtered out the
expenses related to some of my other mobile ventures besides FC,
leaving only FreeCalypso expenses, and added all of them up.  The
result: I have spent a total of $12257.34 USD in accounted-for
FreeCalypso expenses from the beginning of the project in 2013 through
the present, and this total only includes those costs which I have
paid with my own money, *not* crowdfunding.  The crowdfunding campaign
for the FCDEV3B brought in a total of about $6700 (total through all
channels, not just the GoFundMe page) which certainly helped a lot,
but as you can see, my own personal investment is still almost double
of what we've collected from everyone else combined.

It still holds though that my asking price for an FCDEV3B board off
the stock shelf (as opposed to build-to-order) is based primarily on
sustainability considerations (preventing the scenario of all current
boards being sold out without generating sufficient revenue to produce
replacements) rather than on sunk costs - the latter are in the past
and should not affect rational decisions regarding the present.  But
given the fact that I was able to spend over 12 kUSD on FreeCalypso
despite not being anywhere close to a member of "the rich", I absolutely
don't buy the argument that $500 for a board is too much to ask for.
If I was able to spend over 12 kUSD on this project purely out of
personal passion while also doing all of the work, every one of you
can most surely afford $500 for a board for which someone else has
already done all of the work.

M~