I would say your 5000 USD for the tooling seem pretty low to me for a steel mold (as opposed to a "soft" aluminium mold). They can easily cost 5-10x more if you factor in mold development.
For full disclosure, I work with factories (Based in China) running plastic injection molding and zinc casting molding.
5kUSD would be a conservative price from our factories; but the item is rather simplistic. As a general rule of thumb, for cases in plastic injection molding, you're correct - you're looking at 10 - 20k easily. Multiple pieces with complicated gating, the price goes up.
Zinc / Metal injection molding involves much more black magic, and this is reflected in the costs.
With all of that said - we're in complete agreement on the main subject - even if tooling cost 5k + 20c per piece, the estimation of $1 for PCBA + PCB Stenciling + molding is way off track, unless it was amortised over tens / hundreds of thousands of pieces.
5kUSD would be a conservative price from our factories; but the item is rather simplistic. As a general rule of thumb, for cases in plastic injection molding, you're correct - you're looking at 10 - 20k easily. Multiple pieces with complicated gating, the price goes up.
Zinc / Metal injection molding involves much more black magic, and this is reflected in the costs.
With all of that said - we're in complete agreement on the main subject - even if tooling cost 5k + 20c per piece, the estimation of $1 for PCBA + PCB Stenciling + molding is way off track, unless it was amortised over tens / hundreds of thousands of pieces.